THE LIBRARY
OF
THE UNIVERSITY
OF CALIFORNIA
LOS ANGELES
FOUR ENGLISH HUMOURISTS
OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
a
FOUE ENGLISH HUMOUEISTS
OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
LECTURES
DELIVERED AT
THE ROYAL INSTITUTION OF GREAT BRITAIN
IN JANUARY AND FEBKUAKY, 1895
By WILLIAM SAMUEL LILLY
HONORAKY FELLOW OF I'ETEKHOUSE, CASIBKIUGE
Ic.li kaiiii
In BolcheB Aachen niir dem eigncu Licht,
Nicht fremdem folgeu.
. ScraLLEK
LONDON
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET
1895
LONDON :
rKlNl'ED BV WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFOKD STUEET AND CHARING CROSS.
?R
^'^
TO
JAMES DEWAR, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S.,
FELLOW OF PETERHOUSE AND JACKSONIAN PROFESSOR OF
EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE;
FULLERIAN PROFESSOR OF CHEMISTRY IN THE ROYAL
INSTITUTION OF <1REAT BRITAIN.
My deae Dewae,
There are two reasons why I have asked
your kind permission to dedicate this vohime
to you.
First, I am desirous to take the present oppor-
tunity of publicly thanking you and the other
members of the Governing Body of Peterhouse,
for electing me an Honorary Fellow of that most
ancient Society. The distinction is one of which,
in any circumstances, I must be deeply sensible.
It is enhanced by the lustre which your European,
your world-wide renown sheds upon our College.
Again, I feel special satisfaction in writing
your name here, as it was, I believe, at your
suggestion that the Managers of the Royal Insti-
tution did me the honour of inviting me to deliver
fi.r\..^ ^>e^A
( vi )
these Lectures. I could well wish that they were
worthier of being thus associated with you. But
you were so kind as to say that you listened to
them with pleasure. And I may be permitted to
say that —
" 1 feel a free,
A leafy luxury, seeing I could please
With these poor offerings, a man like thee."
I am, my dear Dewar,
Most sincerely yours,
W. S. LILLY.
Athenaeum Club,
May 24, 1895.
ADVEETISEMENT.
These Lectures, delivered from a few brief notes, are now
printed from the shorthand-writer's report. But the Author
has corrected such faults, whether of expression or con-
ception, as he has detected, and has developed some trains
of thought which it was not possible for him to follow
out so fully as he could have wished when speaking at
the Royal Institution.
SUMMARY.
LECTUEE I.
THE HUMOURIST AS DEMOCRAT.
DICKENS.
PAGE
Definition of the word " humourist : " An artist lolio play-
fully gives us his intuition of the ivorld and human life . 3
This large sense of the word is somewhat new — at all
events in English. But the world has in all ages
possessed gifted souls to whom, if so understood, it
may be fitly applied 6
In this age the novel is the ordinaiy vehicle of humour.
But there are humourists — Carlyle for example — who
find other forms of composition more suitable to their
temperament and genius 9
In these Lectures, Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot,
and Carlyle will be considered as typical English
humourists of the nineteenth century : Dickens being
The Humourist as Democrat, Thackeray, The Humourist
as Philosopher, G eorge Eliot, The Humourist as Poet,
and Carlyle, The Humourist as Prophet . . .11
These descriptions are not exclusive, but indicate the
endowment predominant in each . . . .12
It is proposed in these Lectures not to analyze and com-
pare the humour of these four writers, but rather to
b
SUMMABY.
PAGE
consider what is the substantive contribution of each
to the world's literature, what his real message to his
day and generation and to us . . . . .12
From the point of view of literary art, Dickens is the
least important of the four. The spell of his strong
magnetic personality has now vanished ; and it must
be allowed that his personages are mostly insig-
nificant, his incidents mostly vulgar; that much of
his thought is crude, that much of his diction is
inept . . . . . . . . . .13
He is really one of the least artistic of writers, and he
is at his best in his earlier works, where he makes
small pretension to art. PicJcioicJc is, perhaps, his
masterpiece .... ... 14
He toiled during the whole of his literary life to reach a
higher standard ; and he seems to have most nearly
attained it in David Copperjield . . . . .14
No doubt he did much good work in the way of genre
painting after David Copperjield; but the high art
which he tried to grasp ever eluded him ... 15
The fact is that his manner is hopelessly common. And
" manner is the constant transpiration of character."
Great genius as he was, he never overcame the vul-
garity of his early education. He represents the
invasion of the novel by the democratic spirit . . 16
But out of his limitations came his strength. His ignor-
ance of the great literary traditions of the Western
world threw him back upon himself; upon his own
observation, his own experience, his own creative
gift ....... . . .17
He possessed vigour and originality in a singular degree.
His violent and lurid imagination invested his
SUMMABY. xi
PAGE
characters with vivid reality. His ideas are strongly
dramatic, or rather melodramatic . . . .17
The foundation of his character was passionate sensibility,
which found vent, with equal readiness, in laughter
and in tears . 19
He excelled equally in burlesque, in caricature, and in
pathos. Specimens of his excellence in these three
styles 19
So much concerning Dickens as a literary artist. His
special work was to democratize the novel , . 27
He revealed the masses to the classes, first making us
realize the degradation and want and misery sur-
rounding wealthy and comfortable homes . . .27
He revealed the masses to themselves, touching and
attracting them as no writer before him had touched
and attracted them, and doing a great work for the
idealization of common life ..... 28
It is not easy to overrate the debt under which he has
thereby laid the world. He, more than any one else,
laboured to deliver the common people from the
debased and vulgar Positivism which is a special
danger of the present day ...... 29
But there is another sense in which Dickens may be
called TJie Humourist as Democrat. While standing
aloof from party politics, which he regarded with
contempt and loathing, he fought strenuously,
throughout his life, for the enfranchisement and
elevation of the masses. He was indefatigable in the
cause of real reform ; and he eifected much . . 30
What his permanent place will be in English literature
is a question which cannot, as yet, be answered.
xii SUM3IABY.
LECTUEE II.
THE HUMOURIST AS PHILOSOPHER.
TIIACKEEAY.
r.vf.E
His popularity with the masses is still very great;
but he is grievously wanting in form, which is what
gives vitality to a book. Moreover, his sentimental
realism is not the highest order of romantic fiction,
although he is by far the greatest English exponent
of it ^-^
"Every inch of him an honest man," was Carlyle's
observation on hearing of his death. And the
ethical sentiment which breathes through his pages
may well cover a multitude of sins of taste . . 33
Taine's indictment of Thackeray. The chief count in it
is that Thackeray is a philosopher, contemplating
the passions satirically, not as poetic forms, but as
moral qualities. Minor offences of Thackeray,
according to Taine, are misanthrojiy and cynicism,
the insignificance of his characters, and his levelling
tendencies ......... 37
Taine's complaint of Thackeray as a moral philosopher
will first be considered. It rests upon the position
that the novelist should be " a psychologist and
nothing more, painting the passions and sentiments
of the soul as they are, and not troubling himself
with their ethical worth and significance" . . 30
It may be conceded that a novelist should be a psycho-
logist. But what is psychology ? . . . .41
SUMMARY. xiii
PAGE
The word means tlie branch of philosophy which studies
the human mind or soul. But for Taine and his
school the soul is merely a poetic expression, a
rhetorical figure ; and what is called mental activity,
is really sensuous consciousness. For Taine psycho-
logy is merely a subordinate department of biology :
he reduces it to molecular physics .... 42
If this is the true account of psychology, no doubt the
ethical idea is an intruder there. For physical
science is wholly the science of the senses, and
knows nothing of justice and injustice, right and
wrong, moral good and moral evil .... 41
If the novelist is a psychologist in this sense, it may be
granted that he has nothing to do with ethics, for
ethics in any true meaning of the word do not exist
for him ......... 42
But this is not a true conception of psychology. Psycho-
logy is not a history of phenomena conventionally
styled psychical, but really physical. It is the science
of a real indivisible agent, the mind, soul, or thinking-
principle which is a man's true self. The unity of the
Ego is its starting-point ...... 42
If psychology be thus conceived of, the novelist, in his
capacity of psychologist, is concerned with men not
as mere matter in motion, but as animated by minds
or souls. And the very first fact about the mind
or soul is that it is endowed with perceptions of
right and wrong, justice and injustice, and the like.
Conscience, the power of volition, the moral senti-
ments, moral habits, moral responsibility, are primary
psychical facts. With them the novelist, qua
psychologist, is necessarily concerned ... 43
xiv SUMMARY.
PAGE
Tlie novel sliould be the image of the human soul. And
the two chief elements of a good novel are truth and
passion .44
The first equipment of a novelist for his task is the per-
ception of the true — that is, of the double character of
ideality and phenomenality possessed by all human
things. The essence of romantic fiction is the close
union of all tlie elements of the composition with
the ideal which they contain ..... 44
From tliis union of the phenomenal and the ideal a novel
derives that character of truth which touches us by
its relation with our double nature. There must be
an ethical ideal of some sort in it — be that ideal right
or wrong, spurious or genuine — if it is to be true to
life : for man is an ethical animal. Of all human
ideals, the moral comes first. It embraces our entire
being ; other ideals only segments thereof . . 44
The proper vocation of the artist in romantic fiction, as of
all artists, is to elevate, to idealize, to refine . . 45
Here is the true distinction between art and physical
science. Physical science deals with all the facts,
regardless of their ethical significance. The artist in
romantic fiction is not concerned with all the facts.
His work is essentially poetical. And the first duty
of the poet is choice ....... 45
The great ethical principles of reserve, respect, reverence,
shame, proscribe limits to imagination as to action.
The passions are largely and legitimately the subject
of the novelist ; but he should deal with them as an
artist, not as a physiologist ..... 45
The ethos of a widely read novel is a most important
question. And the ethos comes out in the author's
SUMMABY.
XV
PAGE
treatment of his subject, rather than in his choice of
personages, his plot, or his catastrophe ... 46
The true test of the merit or demerit of a novel is the
impression left on a healthy mind ; a mind infected
neither by pruriency nor by prudery ... 47
When the sensuous impression overpowers the spiritual,
we have a bad book 48
Applying these principles to the novelist's treatment of
sexual love, we may say that while the physiologist
is concerned with it as a mere animal impulse, he,
in his character of psychologist, is concerned with it
as transformed, in greater or less degree, by the
imaginative faculty ....... 49
View taken of this matter by Balzac, with whom Taine
compares Thackeray ....... 50
No doubt Thackeray is far inferior in genius to Balzac,
nor has he Balzac's talent. But the two men had in
common certain natural endowments, originality of
intellect, perspicuity of observation, a warm and
potent instinct of practical life, and a curious
divinatory power ....... 51
Such were some of Thackeray's most striking natural en-
dowments for his work as a humourist. His training
at the Charterhouse and at Cambridge, his travels
in Germany and France, and the time spent by him
at an Inn of Court supplied him with his intellectual
preparation for his destined task . . . .51
His loss of fortune, in early manhood, drove him to
literature as a profession ; and a grievous domestic
affliction which befell him, gave him the moral dis-
cipline required for deepening and strengthening his
character ......... 53
xvi SUMMABY.
PAGK
His literary apprenticeship of twelve or thirteen years
was a period of unremitting labour. It was not until
1846, that the publication of his Snoh Pa])ers in Punch
established his reputation as a master of his craft . 55
The Book of Snobs is a masterpiece of humour. Its play-
fulness is of the satiric order. The keen vivacious
satire of an accomplished man of the world is
Thackeray's distinctive note as a humourist . . 56
Vindication of Thackeray from Taine's charge of levelling
tendencies 56
The publication of Vanity Fair, in 1847, marked Thackeraj^'s
advent from obscurity and poverty to fame and com-
parative afSuence. Singular literary merits of the
book. The reputation made by it maintained by his
later works 58
Thackeray's great veracity as a literary artist ... 59
Thackeray paints life as it is. And he knew that life
rests upon elementary moralities. His books are his
experiences of life, his observations of life, his medita-
tions upon life, dramatized, so to speak, and put
upon his mimic stage. And the ethos of the drama
is ethical 61
Philosophy, in the narrow and technical sense of meta-
physics, cannot be ascribed to him. But he was a
philosopher in the wider sense of a genuine lover of
wisdom, an eager student of real existence . . 61
His philosophy of life comes into special prominence iu
all his writings, it is his distinguishing charac-
teristic, and should be accounted his peculiar merit . 61
He was not a misanthrope, as Taine asserts. Clearly as
he saw, and vividly as he painted, the seamy side
SUMMABY. xvii
'»'■
LECTUKE III.
THE HUMOURIST AS POET.
GEOBGE ELIOT.
PAGE
of society, he saw with equal clearness and painted
with equal vividness, the truth and incorruptuess,
the purity and goodness, the love and pity which
exist side by side with the abounding evil ; and he
discerned in these things the real goods of existence . 62
His " good people " are not contemptible and unin-
teresting ......... 63
Nor was he a cynic or a mere satirist. He appeals to our
primary moral sympathies, our fundamental ethical
beliefs, our highest spiritual instincts : and springs
of tenderness and pathos are ever Avelling up in his
writings ......... 64
His moral philosoplij- breathes the spirit of Kant, although
we may be quite sure that he had never read a line
of that master. It is underlain by three great
principles, which are distinctly Kantian : the per-
sonality of man, the probationary character of human
life, and the existence of a state beyond the phe-
nomenal, wliere the triumph of the moral law will
be assured ........ 66
The highest aspect of Thackeray's work . .72
The deadness of ordinary life 75
Various instruments of spiritual awakening : religion,
external nature, and art . . . .77
xviii SUMMABY.
PAGE
Nature and art are essentially religious, in the highest
signification of the word ...... 79
The form of art which appeals most widely is the poetic ;
and at the present time tlie function of poetry is of
ever-growing importance . . . . . .79
In these da3-s the most widely influential poets are those
who do not employ metrical forms . . . .81
It must be remembered that poetry is independent of those
forms. " The accomplishment of verse " is not of its
essence ......... 81
Truth has two modes of expression : the language of fact
and the language of fancy ; the tongue of the phe-
nomenal and the tongue of the ideal. The true anti-
thesis is not between prose and poetry, but between
prose and verse ........ 82
To appreciate verse demands much more culture than
to appreciate prose. And in this age literature has
become democratized. Poets who are content to be
unmetrical, command many more readers than poets
who write in verse. For a long time to come the
novelist, according to his inspiration and in proportion
to his power, is likely to be the most popular, the
most successful preacher of ideal truth ... 82
In George Eliot we have The Humourist as Poet. Her
humour is of the Socratic order. Her truest poetry
is in her novels ......-• 84
She possessed in an eminent degree the " six powers requi-
site for the production of poetry," which Wordsworth
has enumerated . . . . • • .86
The ethos of her prose poetry has been sometimes mis-
apprehended. She has been described as " the most
influential Positivist writer of her age : " and as
SUMMABY.
XIX
PAGE
" the first gi'eat godless writer of fiction that has
appeared in England "..,... 90
No doubt she was in a sense a Positivist. Bnt she was
not an influential Positivist writer. The writings in
which she expounded her philosophy, such as it was,
exercised little influence. And her novels were not
a vehicle for Positivist propagandism ... 91
To George Eliot, the artist — whatever she may have held
as a philosopher — the great Theistic idea was the
source of her deepest and most powerful inspiration . 93
Tn the artist the logical understanding does not hold the
first place. True art is a kind of inspiration. And
this is sufficient to explain how the negative conclu-
sions which George Eliot held intellectually, may be
reconciled with the vivid realization of Theistic faith
which is so marked a characteristic of her novels . 97
In this union of Positivism and Mysticism she is typical
of her age ......... 98
The ethos of her prose poetry is essentially that of the
great tragedians of ancient Hellas ; her function was
" that of the aesthetic, not the doctrinal teacher, the
rousing of the nobler emotions " .... 99
There is a strong spiritual affinity between her and
Euripides . . . . , . . . .100
The absolute and indefeasible claim of the Divine Law
upon our obedience — whatever account she may have
given to herself of that law — and the inexorable-
ness of its penal sanctions, are the deep underlying
thought of George Eliot . . . . . .101
" From the bare diagram of Brother Jacob to the profound
and finished picture of Middlcmarch, retribution is
the constant theme and motive of George Eliot's art " 102
XX SUMMABY.
PAGE
The influence of her works is singularly ennobling. She
is the great tragic poet of our age . . . .113
Edmond Scherer's judgment of her . . . . .113
LECTUEE IV.
THE HUMOURIST AS rROPHET.
CABLYLE.
Widespread veneration for Carlyle during the last twenty
or thirty years of his life 117
" Explosion of the doggeries " shortly after his death . 118
In extenuation of his faults, ma}' be pleaded his intense
sensitiveness, the melancholy ever attendant on
genius, the sadness impressed upon peasant life in
Scotland, and his constant suffering from dyspepsia . 119
Perhaps the dyspepsia Avas an incident of his prophetic
calling 122
A humourist he is in the fullest sense of the word . .123
And lie is The Humourist as Fropliet ; seeing, by virtue of
the insight, the inspiration, that is in him, through
phenomena into reality, rightly reading and inter-
preting the signs of the times ..... 125
His spiritual history. ....... 126
His obligations to Goethe 131
Rejects much of his hereditary Calvinism, but retains
what he regards as its two elemental and self-
evident facts 133
SUMMARY. xxi
PAGE
His Theism ........ . 133
His ethics . • 135
It appeared to him that the fundamental truths of religion
and morals which he so strongly held, had largely-
lost their hold upon men's hearts and lives . .137
Side by side with a profession of Christianity not con-
sciously false, he found practical Atheism . . .139
And the Utilitarian philosophy appeared to him the^ap-
propriate philosophy of an age of practical Atheism . 139
Our political, our social arrangements, appeared to him
unveracious, unjust, and doomed. That, as he con-
sidered, was the meaning of the popular movement
throughout Evirope, little as its leaders knew . .140
In his article Corn Law Bliymes which appeared in 1832,
his outlook on the condition of the world is clearly
indicated ......... 142
And from that time until 1867, when he published his
Niagara, he felt from time to time " a kind of call
and monition" to lift up his testimony concerning
the condition of England : whence his Chartism, his
Past and Present, his Latter Day Pamphlets . .143
Veneration for, conformity with, loyalty to truth — this was
the Alpha and Omega of his spiritual and intellectual
life . . . . • • • • • .151
He found the political order reared on one fundamental
lie — the right of all men, whatever their capacity or
incapacity, to an equal share of political power ; and
the economic order upon another fundamental lie, ex-
pressed in the phrase, " the greatest happiness of
the greatest number " 152
xxii SUM3IABY.
I' AGE
To the cult of majorities, Carlyle oj^posed the cult of
superiorities ; to the rule of the multitude, the
necessit}'- of loyalty and obedience .... 15-t
To the purely empirical doctrine based on calculations of
profit and loss, that happiness, or agreeable feeling,
is the test of all rules of conduct and the end of life,
Carlyle opposed the fundamental, aboriginal, inde-
composable idea of riglit as a divine order ruling
throughout the universe ...... 156
Further, Carlyle discerned and declared, that at the
root of Eousseauan egalitarianism and Benthamite
utilitarianism there lay a false concej)tion of human
freedom, an untrue doctrine of man's autonomy,
issuing, in the one case, in the tyranny of the mob, in
the other, in the tyranny of capitalists . . .158
Carlyle judged that the condition of human freedom is in
obedience to law issuing from the nature of things :
that liberty to find one's appointed woi'k in the world
and to do it, is alone real liberty . . . .158
The true description of the political and economical con-
dition of this age appeared to Carlyle to be not liberty
but anarchy ........ 159
The assertion sometimes made that Carlyle sympathized
with the socialistic movement is partly true. In so
far as that movement is a protest against the political
and economical anarchy of our day and on behalf of
the reorganization of the commonwealth, Carlyle did
sympathize with it . . . . . . .161
Carlyle agreed with the Socialists in holding that work is
a social function and property a social trust : that
the great economic problem of the age is the proper
division of the fruits of labour, and that we can no
SUMMARY. xxiii
throughout his life was one of devout and grateful
reverence .........
PAGE
longer leave that division " to be scrambled for by
the law of the strongest, law of sujjply-and-demand,
law of Laissez-faire, and other idle laws and unlaws " 163
But Carlyle did not believe in the equal distribution of
physical comfort — the Utopia which many of the
leaders of the socialistic movement are looking for,
and, as they suppose, hastening unto — any more than
he believed in the equal distribution of political power 107
Moreover, between Carlyle and the most widely popular
school of Socialism there was a great gulf fixed.
Carlyle's political and economical doctrines are the
outcome of his Theism and his transcendental con-
ception of duty. That school is frankly atheistic
and utterly unethical ; and its teaching would have
been reprobated by Carlyle as " a deadly plague " . 167
In Carlyle's political and social doctrine the sacred rights
and inalienable prerogatives of human personality
appear to be inadequately recognized . . .172
And in his religious belief precious elements that the
world cannot do without, seem to be lacking . .173
Though personally unable to associate himself with any
Christian Church or sect, his attitude to Christianity
173
And as years went on, his sympathies with existing
religions grew larger . . • • • .175
Valediction ......... 175
K
LECTUEE I.
THE HUMOUKIST AS DEMOCEAT.
DICKENS.
B
FOUK ENGLISH HUMOUKISTS OF
THE NINETEENTH CENTUKY.
LECTUEE I.
THE HUMOUEIST AS DEMOCEAT.
DICKENS.
It is a dictum of Cicero that every rational
discussion should begin with a definition. I hope
that the four Lectures which I shall have the
honour and the pleasure of delivering here, will
be rational discussions. And, therefore, I will not
neglect the monition of the great Roman dialec-
tician. I will begin by endeavouring to place
before you a definition of the word "humourist."
The title of these Lectures, as I need hardly
say, has been suggested to me by Thackeray.
Let us turn to his English Humourists of the
Eighteenth Century, and see how he accounted
of the humourist. He tells us —
" The humourous writer proposes to awaken
and direct your love, your pity, your kindness —
4 DICKENS. [LECT.
your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture
— your tenderness for the weak, the poor, the
oppressed, the unhappy. To the best of his
means and ability he comments on all the ordi-
nary actions and passions of life almost. He
takes upon himself to be the weekday preacher,
so to speak."
Now, this seems to me as excellent as it is
admirably expressed. It is not a definition, indeed.
But it will help us towards one. The ordinary
actions and passions of life are the subject of the
humourist. But he brings to them what the
Germans call jSchauen, vision, intuition. He sees
those ordinary actions and passions more clearly
than we see them. Custom dulls the perception
of most of us. The obvious — that which is imme-
diately before our eyes — is what we know least
accurately. But more. The humourist is not
merely a spectator of the ordinary actions and
passions of life. He pierces below the surface of
things to the secret recesses of the moral world.
He is an observer of manners and of psychological
facts ; a student of character and of external
nature ; a painter of social phenomena and of
the reveries of the solitary heart. He holds up
the mirror to nature, the magic mirror of artistic
imagination. And in it he reveals to us our
environment and ourselves. His study, his obser-
vation, supply him with the materials wherewith
his genius is to body forth an image of man and
I.] GENIUS AND TALENT. 5
society. I use the word "genius" advisedfy.
Mere closeness of observation, skill in delineation,
taste and judgment in arranging the incidents of
his fable, a certain power of idealization, are
necessary to him ; but they are not enough.
Carlyle rightly considered humour the character-
istic of the highest order of mind. To constitute
a man a humourist, in the full sense of the word,
he must possess that creative gift which is the
special characteristic of genius.
Let us dwell on this a little ; it is worth while.
For all the difference between talent and genius
is here. Talent is merely imitative, and all imita-
tion is more or less false. But genius is creative.
And all its creations are, in a sense, real. I do
not mean that they necessarily correspond with
phenomenal reality. In a work of fantasy they do
not. There never was an old sailor like the
ancient mariner in that wonderful poem which is
the high-water mark of Coleridge's genius. But
the ancient mariner is pre-eminently a real
creation, a living type. The types which come
from the hands of genius are living types. It is
not that the man of genius has imagination and
that the man of talent has it not. It is rather —
Goethe, as I remember, has admirably expressed
this — that there are two kinds of imagination, the
passive and the active. We all have passive
imagination in a greater or less degree. And by
means of it we apprehend the images of sensible
6 DICKENS. [lect.
things, and reproduce them in our memory, and
associate them with material objects. But the
incommunicable attribute of genius is that active
imagination which constrains exterior objects to
express the artist's thought. This is the divine
endowment of those select few who alone, in any-
true sense, can be called poets — creators, that is —
whether they use the brush, the chisel, the musical
instrument, or the pen, to body forth what they
discern in the high reason of their fancies. This
the humourist has in common with other artists.
What is his differentia^ as the technical phrase is,
his special note, his characteristic endowment ?
It is that he treats his subject with a certain
playfulness. It may be the grim playfulness of
the tiger, as in Swift, or the sportive playfulness
of the kitten, as in Gay. But, whatever its form
— and there are a great many forms which it
may assume — that it is which differentiates the
humourist from other artists. And now I think
we may get our definition. The humourist, we
may say, is an artist who playfully gives us his
intuition of the world and human life. He is
admirably pictured in the description of Horace
which we owe to Persius —
" Omne vafer vitium ridenti Flaccus amico
Tangit et admissus circum prsecordia ludit."
I suppose this large sense of the word is some-
what new — in English, at all events. I am not sure
I.] WHAT IS A EUMOUBIST? 7
that any of our writers before Thackeray used it iu
so wide a significance. But certainly the world
has, in every age, possessed highly gifted souls to
whom it may, if so understood, be fitly applied.
Sm'ely the old Hebrew sage to whom we owe the
book of Ecclesiastes, Koheleth, if that is a proper
name — it probably is not — was a humourist of no
mean order. M. Eenan has pictured him as " old,
decrepit, and exhausted," having drained the cup
of life, and then moraHzing over its lees. Whether
that account be true or not, certainly Koheleth's
summary of human Hfe, "Vanity of vanities — all
is vanity," is true, not of an age, but for all time ;
while we have the humourous application of that
great verity — '' sapientia ludens in orbe terrarum "
in the precept, '' Go thy way, eat thy bread with
joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart, for
God now accepteth thy works ; let thy garments
be always white, and let thy head lack no oint-
ment ; live joyfully with the wife whom thou
lovest, all the days of the life of thy vanity : "
sportive kind advice, which is, I suppose, the
Hebrew equivalent of the Horatian " carpe diem."
The great Hellenic humourist is Aristophanes.
What brilliancy of sarcasm, what exuberance of
wit light up his vivid page ! With what inimit-
able playfulness, does he paint the picture of
his times ; for example, in The Clouds, the most
perfect, as I think, of all his comedies. And I
may add, what a satire is it on him — the grim
8 DICKENS. [LECT.
humour of events — that honest as I do not doubt
his intentions were, he should have succeeded in
so completely misrepresenting the noblest of his
countrymen ; nay, that he should have contributed,
as I fear we must hold he did, to " the foulest deed
save one that ever disgraced the annals of our
race — the accusation and execution of Socrates."
The typical Eoman humourist I take to be Horace.
I like to picture him to myself, sauntering along
the Via Sacra, '' nescio quid meditans nugarum et
totus in ilHs : " meditating playfully on " trifles "
which were to issue in those perfectly chiselled odes
of his, the delight of cultivated men for eighteen
generations since ; or in those inimitable satires,
as they may be truly called, for even Pope's imita-
tions of them — far and away the best — fall very
far short of the originals. In the Middle Ages I
suppose Boccaccio stands out as the greatest
humourist. Landor has well said : '' In touches
of nature, in truth of character, in the vivacity
and versatility of imagination, in the narrative,
in the descriptive, in the playful, in the pathetic,
the world never saw his equal, until the sunrise of
Shakespeare." " The sunrise of Shakespeare " !
Yes. Here as elsewhere he is the supreme artist :
the humourist —
" whom we know full well
The world's wide spaces cannot parallel."
He is not merely the gi-eat poet of human nature
in all times. He is also the most humourous
I.] TEE OBDINABY VEHICLE OF EU310UB. 9
delineator of life and society in the sixteenth
century. Of the great humourist to whom the
world owes Don Quixote — that unique monument
of Spanish genius, at the moment when it
descended from the sphere of chivalrous ideahsm
to grovel in the dust — I must not speak. I must
not even glance at the humourists of France,
although it is hard to pass by in silence such old
and cherished friends as Eabelais and Montaigne,
or at those of Germany and Italy. I need say
nothing of our own humourists of the last century,
concerning whom Thackeray has written so well.
I have said enough, perhaps, to indicate the sense
in which I use the words '' humour " and
"humourist," and so to make, as I trust, a fair
start.
I go on to observe that in this age of ours the
novel is the most ordinary vehicle of humour.
Johnson defined the novel as "a short tale,
generally of love." The " short tale " has
developed, at all events in this country, into the
familiar three volumes. Its chief theme is still
the most universal, the most masterful of passions ;
yet it claims to survey the whole field of human
action. The political novel, the military novel, the
religious novel, are well-known varieties of it. And
there are those who are by way of giving us the
scientific novel. The vast space which romantic
fiction occupies in contemporary literature is a
curious fact well worth pondering. Here, I must
10 DICKENS. [LECT.
content myself with observing that it corresponds
with and supplies a universal want.
" The trivial round, the common task,
Would furnish all we ought to ask,"
the familiar and beautiful lines tell us. Well, but
they do not. There is in man an invincible
tendency to break away from the limits of the
actual, to escape from "the trivial round, the
common task" into the realms of imagination.
The function — a perfectly legitimate and whole-
some function — of the novel is to minister to this
tendency. Side by side with the material life is
the ideal life. The novelist paints the ideal life.
Man is perennially interesting to man. And this
age of ours is specially introspective. That is one
of its chief characteristics. It loves to contem-
plate itself; to see itself delineated with its
passions, its manners, its vices, its virtues, its
contrasts, its wants, its secret struggles and violent
excitements. And when this is done by a true
artist, the charm is very great. Perhaps a novel
of a really high order is the most attractive — the
most seductive, I may say — of all the works of the
human intellect. And this comes partly from
the freedom which the artist in romantic fiction
enjoys. He may give us historical truth, without
being in bondage to official details. His philosophy
may be profound, without the fetters of system.
He may write poetry of a high order, unshackled
by metre or rhyme. It is not surprising that our
I.] TYPICAL ENGLISH HUMOURISTS. 11
great humourists in this age generally become
novelists. Generally, not always. There are
those, Carlyle for example, who find other forms
of composition more suitable to their temperament
and genius.
Now, in the Lectures which I have thought
proper to introduce to you with these observations,
I propose to say something about four writers
whom I consider typical English humourists of
this century so near its close. They are Dickens,
Thackeray, George Eliot, and Carlyle. The
question at once occurs, Why these ? I will
tell you. In the first place it would be highly
inexpedient, for reasons which will be obvious, to
select any but those " unto whose greatness death
hath set his seal." I confine myself, therefore, to
masters who are no longer with us. Of those who
have passed away, no doubt there are many who in
a sense are typical English humourists. HazHtt,
Charles Lamb, Hood, Sir Walter Scott, Lord
Lytton, and Peacock are a few whose names at
once occur to one. But the four memorable writers
whom I have selected, appear to me to occupy
a place by themselves, both as expressing and
as impressing their age. They are pre-eminently
" representative," to use Emerson's phrase — ex-
ponents, in their different ways, of the Zeitgeist.
In Dickens we have The Humourist as Democrat ;
12 DICKENS. [lect.
in Thackeray, The Humourist as Philosopher ; iu
George Eliot, The Humourist as Poet ; in Carlyle,
The Humourist as Prophet. I must ask you to
take these descriptions on trust for the present.
I shall hereafter endeavour to vindicate them.
But I may here just add the caution that they
are not intended to he exclusive. All four of
these great humourists were essentially of their
age, and were therefore, in a sense, democrats.
They were all, in a sense, philosophers, poets,
prophets. But I have described each by the
endowment which seems to me predominant in
him; by the gift which he possessed in largest
measure, and of which he made fullest proof.
And here let me observe that I shall deal very
little with the distinctively humourous element in
my four subjects. It would be beside my purpose
to analyze and compare their various kinds of
playfulness. That has been done over and over
again. And I should feel that I had brought you
here on false pretences, if I were to do it once
more. I shall assume that you know all about
that; and I shall follow a line of thought not
perhaps so familiar to you. I shall occupy myself
specially in considering what the substantive con-
tribution of each of these four great writers to the
world's literature is ; what is the real message of
each to his day and generation, and to us.
To speak first then of Dickens. I take him
I.] A STRONG MAGNETIC PEBSONALITY. 13
first for several reasons. One reason is that lie
comes first chronologically. Another reason is
that less time will suffice for speaking of him
than for speaking of any of the other three. And
the introductory remarks which I have found it
necessary to make, have taken up a quarter of
my hour. There are, indeed, some points of view
from which the work of Dickens may be said to
he more important than the work of Thackeray,
George Eliot, or even Carlyle. But from the
point of view of the literary art he is the least
important of the four. Let me first of all speak
of him from this point of view. Let me consider
him as an artist. The time has now come when
we can hope to do that impartially. It could not
have been done impartially when the world was
under the spell of his strong magnetic personality ;
when the hardest head, the most captious critic,
had to give in to him. Sydney Smith said, " I
resisted Mr. Dickens as long as I could ; but he
has conquered me." He conquered every one.
He certainly conquered me, as a boy. I now go
back to him with an effort. I have looked through
those twenty odd volumes of his in preparation
for this Lecture. It is the first time for some
years that I have opened him. And I confess
I marvel at the fascination which he once had
for me. I stand aghast at the inane insignificance
of most of his personages, at the vapid vulgarity of
most of his incidents, at the consummate crudity of
14 DICKENS. [lect.
mucli of his thought, at the intolerable ineptness
of much of his diction. He was constantly talking
— at least in his latter years — of his art. He
seems to me one of the least artistic of writers.
He is at his best in his earlier works, where he
makes small pretence to art. In my opinion his
masterpiece is Pickwick — '' a comic middle-class
epic " it has been called, perhaps not unhappily.
It is irresistibly funny ; inimitably fresh ; incom-
parably fantastic ; a farce, but a farce of a very
high order. Dickens himself always thought
slightingly of it. He was ambitious, laudably
ambitious, to do greater things. And during the
whole of his literary life he toiled earnestly,
passionately, to attain a higher standard. I think
he came nearest to that standard in David Copper-
field. There is much — verj^ much — there which
we could wish away. In fact I, if I take the
book up, give effect to my wish, and practically
put aside a great deal of it. And no doubt many
other readers do the same. But it is informed
by a simple power, a sober veracity, a sustained
interest, peculiarly its own among its author's
works. Dickens's young men are, as a rule,
impossible. They are well-nigh all of the same
inane type. He seems to have got them out of
an Adelphi melodrama. But David Copperfield,
who is a transcript from his own troublous and
distressed childhood and youth, is, at all events,
human. His young women are as inane as his
I.] ''DAVID COPPEBFIELD:' 15
young men. His amatory scenes — good heavens
let us not speak of them and their mawkish
sentimentalities ! What a theme for a poet had
he in Steerforth and Little Em'ly ! How George
Sand would have treated it ! How George Eliot
has treated a similar theme in Adam Bede I But
Dickens possessed no words to tell forth that
idyll. And if he had possessed them he dared
not to have uttered them. He stood in too much
awe of Mr. Podsnap's '' young person." The
history of the love of Steerforth and Little
Em'ly was impossible to him. He could not have
narrated it if he would ; and he would not if he
could.
I think he never again wrote so felicitously
as in David Gopperfield. No doubt he did many
fine things afterwards in the way of genre paint-
ing. We may regard him as a literary Teniers.
But as years went on his manner seems to me
to grow more unnatural, more stilted, more in-
tolerable. The higher art which he tried to
grasp, ever eluded him. There is an absence
of composition in his work ; there is no play of
light and shade ; there is no proportion, no per-
spective. His books cannot be said to be com-
posed, they are improvised. Consider Our Mutual
Friend, which he is stated to have regarded
with peculiar satisfaction. I took it up, a few
days ago, intending to read it carefully through.
I was greatly tempted to lay it down at the
16 DICKENS. [lect.
second chapter. Tliat chapter, as some of you
will doubtless remember, gives an account of a
dinner-party at the Veneerings. I wonder whether
anything bearing a less appreciable relation to
life was ever written. Twemlow is as unreal as
Lord Dundreary, and much less amusing. Lady
Tippins is as untrue as she is uninteresting. Was
there ever a barrister bearing the remotest likeness
to Eugene Wrayburn ? or a solicitor possessing
the smallest affinity with Mortimer Lightfoot ?
It must be remembered that Dickens professed to
be a painter of manners, not an artist working in
the domain of fantasy, and so was bound to keep
in touch with actual existence. Then the butler,
I remember, is likened to an analytical chemist,
because when he offers wine to the guests he
seems to say, "You wouldn't if you knew what
it is made of." And when from time to time
that domestic is mentioned, he is styled " The
Analytical Chemist." This seems to me by no
means exquisite fooling. The whole book is
ghastly and phantasmal, notwithstanding the vivid
flashes of genius which illuminate it here and
there.
The fact is that Dickens's manner is as common
as it can be. A very acute French critic once
remarked to me " Sa maniere d'ecrire est tout-a-
fait bourgeoise ; " and that is the truth. But,
according to Sir James Makintosh's happy dictum,
manner is the constant transpiration of character.
r.] '' PICTURES FROM ITALY." 17
If we want a self-revelation of Dickens, we have
only to look at his Pictures from Italy — the worst
thing he ever perpetrated. Of course there are
touches of his fine genius in it, as there are in all
his writings ; for example, that account of the
cicerone at Mantua, than which Sterne never did
anything better. But, taken as a whole, it is
bourgeois, in the worst sense of the word. It
might have proceeded from a very superior bag-
man — a bagman of genius. Dickens's genius,
great as it was, never enabled him to overcome
the vulgarity of his early education. He repre-
sents the invasion of the novel by the democratic
spirit. One of his French critics has sagaciously
remarked, " II etait ne peuple, et il Test toujours
demeure."
But it is precisely out of Dickens's limitations
that his strength came. His ignorance of the
great literary traditions of the Western world
threw him back upon himself, upon his own
observation, his own experience, his own crea-
tive gift. No doubt, as the Eoman poet says,
the acquisition of the ingenuous arts softens
our manners and redeems them from brutahty.
But it certainly tends to rub off " the picturesque
of man and man;" to substitute form and gloss
for vigour and originality. No one can deny that
Dickens possessed these qualities of vigour and
originality in a singular degree. His violent and
lurid imagination, fixed upon one object, became
c
18 DICKENS. [lect.
a kind of possession. It irresistibly prompted
him ; it imperiously commanded him as a revela-
tion. I know of no writer whose ideas are more
strongly dramatic. He wrote, as the French
would say, with his temperament. He lived
in his work. The children of his brain were
as real to him as the children of his flesh and
blood. And it is precisely because they were
so real to him, that they are real to us. It is
true that he exhibits, often enough, caricatures,
monsters, deformities. But they live in his
pages by the power of his creative genius,
though in actual life they have no existence.
It is well observed by Mrs. Eitchie, in her
charming book, Chapters from some Memoirs.
" One sees people in Dickens's pages; their tricks
of expression, their vivid sayings, their quaint
humour and oddities, do not surprise one ; one
accepts everything as a matter of course, no
matter how unusual it may be."
This was the result of that strong dramatic
genius of his which came out, very early in his
career, in his shorthand reports of proceedings in
the police courts for the Chronicle newspaper;
and which, in his maturer life, was displayed so
wonderfully in his readings. I have never heard
such reading before or since. It was, in fact, one
man sustaining three or four characters, and,
without the illusion of scenery or costume, bring-
ing them before us as vividly as if we saw them
I.] PASSIONATE SENSIBILITY. 19
on tlie theatrical stage. I have called his genius
dramatic ; it was rather melodramatic. And I
confess I do not know anything which affects,
which, if I may use the word, fetches one more
than a well-sustained melodrama. People some-
times talk of Dickens's affectations. Unjustly.
His mannerisms, even the most ungainly of them,
are part and parcel of the man, just as Sir Henry
Irving's well-known stage walk and stage voice
are part and parcel of Sir Henry Irving.
It was Leigh Hunt who said of Dickens, " He
has life and soul enough for fifty men." And the
passionate sensibility which Taine considered,
rightly, as I think, to be the very foundation
of his character, found expression, with equal
readiness, in laughter and in weeping. He is one
of the very few artists who excel equally in
bmlesque, in caricature, and in pathos. He
moves us at his will to boisterous merriment, to
quiet amusement, to irresistible tears. What
more audacious than the buffoonery of Mr.
Richard Swiveller ? What more witty than the
satire on the Circumlocution Office ? What more
touching than the picture of Little Nell ? —
Landor's favourite character ; the most perfect bit
of pathetic writing since Cordeha, as that savage
old critic Jeffrey judged. Yes : in burlesque, in
caricature, and in pathos, Dickens has not been
surpassed in our literature. Let me give three
specimens which, in my judgment, exhibit him at
20 DICKENS. [LECT.
his best in each of these styles. As an example
of Dickens's power in burlesque, I will read you a
story of Mr. Samuel Weller's. You will remember
how when Mr. Pickwick chose rather to abide in
the Fleet Prison than to pay the damages and
costs in the action of Bardell v. PichioicT<:, his
faithful body-servant procures his own arrest in
order to join his master there. Mr. Pickwick,
though greatly touched by this proof of Sam's
attachment, remonstrates.
" ' I takes my determination on principle, sir,'
remarked Sam, ' and you takes yours on the same
ground ; vich puts me in mind o' the man as killed
his-self on principle, vich o' course you've heerd
on, sir.' Mr. Weller paused when he arrived at
this point, and cast a comical look at his master
out of the corners of his eyes.
" ' There is no of course in the case, Sam,'
said Mr. Pickwick, gradually breaking into a smile
in spite of the uneasiness which Sam's obstinacy
had given him. ' The fame of the gentleman in
question never reached my ears.'
" ' No, sir,' exclaimed Mr. Weller. ' You
astonish me, sir ; he wos a clerk in a guv'ment
office, sir.'
'' ' Was he ? ' said Mr. Pickwick.
"'Yes, he wos, sir,' replied Mr. Weller; 'and
a wery pleasant gentleman too — one o' the percise
and tidy sort, as puts their feet in little india-
rubber fire-buckets ven its vet veather, and never
has no other bosom friends but hare-skins ; he
saved up his money on principle, wore a clean
I.] A STOBr OF MB. SAMUEL WELLEKS. 21
shirt ev'iy day on principle, never spoke to none
of his relations on principle, fear they shou'd want
to borrow money of him ; and wos altogether, in
fact, an uncommon agreeable character. He had
his hair cut on principle vunce a fortnight, and
contracted for his clothes on the economic prin-
ciple — three suits a year, and send back the old
vuns. Being a werry reg'lar gen'lm'n he din'd
ev'ry day at the same place, vere it wos one and
ninepence to cut off the joint ; and a werry good
one and ninepence worth he used to cut, as the
landlord often said, vith the tears a tricklin' down
his face, let alone the vay he used to poke the fire
in the vinter time, vich wos a dead loss o' four-
pence ha'penny a day, to say nothin' at all o' the
aggrawation o' seein' him do it. So uncommon
grand vith it too ! '' Post arter the next
gen'lm'n," he sings out ev'ry day ven he comes
in. " See arter the Times ^ Thomas ; let me look
at the Mornin' Herald, ven it's out o' hand ; don't
forget to bespeak the Chronicle; and just bring
the 'Tizer, vill you;" and then he'd sit vith his
eyes fixed on the clock, and rush out just a quarter
of a minit afore the time to vaylay the boy as wos
a-comin' in vith the evenin' paper, vich he'd read
vith sich intense interest and persewerance, as
vorked the other customers up to the wery con-
fines of desperation and insanity, 'specially one
i-rascible old gen'lm'n as the vaiter wos always
obliged to keep a sharp eye on at sich times, 'fear
he should be tempted to commit some rash act
vith the carving-knife. Veil, sir, here he'd stop,
occupyin' the best place for three hours, and
22 DICKENS. [lect.
never takin' nofchin' arter his dinner but sleep,
and then he'd go avay to a coffee-house a few
streets off, and have a small pot o' coffee and four
crumpets, arter vich he'd valk home to Kensington
and go to bed. One night he wos took wery ill ;
sends for the doctor ; doctor comes in a green fly,
vith a kind o' Eobinson Crusoe set o' steps as he
could let down ven he got out, and pull up arter
him ven he got in, to perwent the necessity o' the
coachman's gettin' down, and thereby undeceivin'
the public by lettin' 'em see that it wos only a
livery coat he'd got on, and not the trousers to
match. '' Wot's the matter ? " says the doctor.
" Wery ill," says the patient. " Wot have you
been a-eatin' of?" says the doctor. "Roast
weal," says the patient. ''Wot's the last thing
you dewoured?" says the doctor. "Crumpets,"
says the patient. " That's it," says the doctor.
" I'll send you a box of pills directly, and don't
you never take no more o' them," he saj^s. " No
more o' wot?" says the patient — "Pills!"
" No ; crumpets," says the doctor. " Wy ? " says
the patient, starting up in bed ; " I've eat four
crumpets ev'ry night for fifteen year on principle."
" Veil, then, you'd better leave 'em off on prin-
ciple," says the doctor. "Crumpets is whole-
some, sir," says the patient. " Crumpets is not
wholesome, sir," says the doctor, wery fiercely.
" But they're so cheap," says the patient, comin'
down a little, " and so wery fillin' at the price."
" They'd be dear to you at any price ; dear if you
wos paid to eat 'em," says the doctor. "Four
crumpets a night," he says, " vill do your bisness
I] 3IB. PODSNAP. 23
in six months ! " The patient looks him full in
the face, and turns it over in his mind for a long
time, and at last he says : '' Are you sure o' that
'ere, sir?" "I'll stake my professional reputa-
tion on it," says the doctor. " How many
crumpets at a sittin' do you think 'ud kill me off
at once ? " says the patient. " I don't know,"
says the doctor. " Do you think half a crown's
vurth 'ud do it," says the patient. " I think it
might," says the doctor. "Three shillin's vurth
'ud be sure to do it, I s'pose ? " says the patient.
" Certainly," says the doctor. " Wery good,"
says the patient; "good night." Next mornin'
he gets up, has a fire lit, orders in three shillins'
vurth o' crumpets, toasts 'em all, eats 'em all, and
blows his brains out.'
"'What did he do that for?' inquired Mr.
Pickwick, abruptly ; for he was considerably
startled by this tragical termination of the narra-
tive.
"'Wot did he do it for, sir!' reiterated Sam.
' Wy, in support of his great principle that
crumpets wos wholesome, and to show that he
wouldn't be put out of his vay for nobody ! ' "
I know nowhere a more perfect specimen of
burlesque than this. And I incline to think that
the account of Mr. Podsnap exhibits equal mastery
in caricature.
" Mr. Podsnap w^as well to do, and stood very
high in Mr. Podsnap's opinion. Beginning with
a good inheritance he had married a good in-
heritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the
24 DICKENS. [lect.
Marine Insurauce way, and was quite satisfied.
He never could make out why everybody was
not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he
set a brilliant social example in being particularly
well satisfied with most things, and above all
other things, with himself. Thus happily ac-
quainted with his own merit and importance, Mr.
Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him
he put out of existence. There was a dignified
conclusiveness — not to add a grand convenience
— in this way of getting rid of disagreeables, which
had done much towards establishing Mr. Podsnap
in his lofty place in Mr. Podsnap 's satisfaction.
' I don't want to know about it ; I don't
choose to discuss ; I don't admit it ! ' Mr. Pod-
snap had even acquired a peculiar flourish of his
right arm in often clearing the world of its most
difficult problems, by sweeping them behind him
(and consequently sheer away) with those words
and a flushed face. For they affronted him.
"Mr. Podsnap's world was not a very large
world, morally ; no, nor even geographically ;
seeing that although his business was sustained
upon commerce with other countries, he con-
sidered other countries, with that important
reservation, a mistake, and of their manners
and customs would conclusively observe, ' Not
Enghsh ! ' when. Presto ! with a flourish of the
arm, and a flush of the face, they were swept
away.
^ ^ ■s^ ^ *
"As a so eminently respectable man, Mr.
Podsnap was sensible of its being required of him
I.] ^^TEE YOUNG PEBSON." 25
to take Providence under his protection. Con-
sequently lie always knew what Providence meant.
Inferior and less respectable men might fall short
of that mark, but Mr. Podsnap was alw^ays up to
it. And it was very remarkable (and must have
been very comfortable) that what Providence
meant, was invariably what Mr. Podsnap meant.
" There was a Miss Podsnap. x\nd this young
rocking-horse was being trained in her mother's
art of prancing in a stately manner without ever
getting on. But the high parental action was
not yet imparted to her, and in truth she was
but an under-sized damsel, with high shoulders,
low spirits, chilled elbows, and a rasped surface of
nose, who seemed to take occasional frosty peeps
out of childhood into womanhood, and to shrink
back again, overcome by her mother's head-dress
and her father from head to foot — crushed by the
mere dead weight of Podsnappery.
"A certain institution in Mr. Podsnap's mind
which he called ' the young person,' may be con-
sidered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap,
his daughter. It was an inconvenient and exact-
ing institution, as requiring everything in the
universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The
question about everything was, would it bring
a blush into the cheek of the young person ? And
the inconvenience of the young person was, that,
according to Mr. Podsnap, she seemed always
liable to burst into blushes when there was no
need at aU. There appeared to be no line of
demarcation between the young person's exces-
sive innocence and another person's guiltiest
26 DICKENS. [lect.
knowledge. Take Mrs. Podsnap's word for it, and
the soberest tints of drab, white, lilac, and grey,
were all flaming red to this troublesome Bull of a
young person."
Dickens's greatest achievement in the pathetic,
perhaps, is the chapter in David Copperfield, en-
titled, " A Greater Loss." Little Em'ly has fled.
And Ham finds her letter. That letter ! In it
we have Dickens's genius without alloy. It is as
the very voice of Nature herself.
" When you, who love me so much better than
I ever have deserved, even when my mind was
innocent, see this, I shall be far away. When
I leave my dear home — my dear home — oh, my
dear home ! — in the morning, it will be never
to come back, unless he brings me back a
lady. This will be found at night, many hours
after, instead of me. Oh, if you knew how
my heart is torn. If even you, that I have
wronged so much, that never can forgive me,
could only know what I sufl'er ! I am too wicked
to write about myself. Oh, take comfort in think-
ing that I am so bad. Oh, for mercy's sake, tell
uncle that I never loved him half so dear as now.
Oh, don't remember how affectionate and kind
you have all been to me — don't remember we
were ever to be married — but try to think as
if I died when I was little, and was buried some-
where. Pray Heaven that I am going away
from, have compassion on my uncle ! Tell him
that I never loved him half so dear. Be his
comfort. Love some good girl, that will be what
I.] TEE DEMOCBATIZING OF THE NOVEL. 27
I was once to uncle, and be true to you, and
worthy of you, and know no shame but me. God
bless all ! I'll pray for all, often, on my knees.
If he don't bring me back a lady, and I don't
pray for my own self, I'll pray for all. My
parting love to uncle. My last tears, and my
last thanks, for uncle ! "
I have, perhaps, said enough to indicate the
judgment I am led to form of Dickens as a
literary artist. A man of the people — he was
that by the environment of his childhood and
youth, although he belonged by birth to what
Matthew Arnold calls ''the lower middles" — a
man of the people, without early intellectual
culture, and, in spite of the grave limitations
and defects chiefly attributable to the want of
it, he pushed his way into enormous popularity
by sheer force of "his demonic genius." It w^as
his work to democratize the novel. This is the
secret of that enormous popularity of his — a
popularity hardly less great on the Continent
of Europe than in the British Empire and the
United States of America. Democracy is the
great fact of this age — a world-wide fact. And
in this fine genius we have " The Humourist
as Democrat." The masses, who a century ago
were nothing in the public order, are now every-
thing, or are fast becoming everything. It w^as
the mission of Dickens to reveal the masses to
28 DICKENS. [lect.
the classes, to reveal the masses to themselves.
He had spent his sad and troublous childhood
and youth among them; he knew their way of
life, their way of thought, their way of speech;
for they have a dialect of their own — more pene-
trating, more picturesque, more pathetic than
the language of the more refined and cultivated.
He first made us realize the degradation and
want and misery surrounding the comfortable
homes of the upper and middle classes. It is a
remark of Taine's — I think it is Taine's — that
until we had read Dickens we did not know
the depths of pity that exist in our own hearts.
There was in him a sympathetic tenderness, a
warmth of emotion, which ever and anon well
up in his most audacious buffooneries, his most
grotesque caricatures, appealing irresistibly to
his readers : this is that " true music in the
inner man of him," which Carlyle discerned and
reverenced.
But it was the work of Dickens to reveal
the masses not only to the classes but to them-
selves. No writer before him had known how
so to attract and touch them. He has done
more than any other man of our day for the
idealization of common life. I do not think it
easy to overrate the debt under which he has
thereby laid the world. Few of us, I fancy,
realize the importance of cultivating the imagina-
tion. There the faculty is — part and parcel of
I.] TEE EOMEB OF THE 3IASSES. 29
US — and it cannot fust in us unused. Den}^ it
a high, a supersensuous ideal, and it mil seek a
low, an infi-abestial ideal. I say " infrabestial "
advisedly. For men and women devoid of human
— that is, supersensuous — ideals, sink, not as is
sometimes said, to the level of the beasts, but below
it. Now I consider Dickens's biographer well
warranted when he writes, " [Dickens's books]
have inculcated humanity in familiar and engaging
forms to thousands and tens of thousands of then-
readers, who can hardly have failed to make [each]
his little world around him somewhat the better
for their teaching. From first to last they were
never for a moment, alien to either the sympathies
or the understandings of any class : and there
were crowds of people . . . that could not have
told you what imagination meant, who were
adding, month by month, to their limited stores,
the boundless gains of imagination." To him
they owe their appreciation of " the dainties that
are bred in a book." To them he opened out
a new world — which really was their old world
transfigured by the magic touch of genius. It
appears to me that one of the great dangers of
this age is a certain moral dryness. It results
from the too complete absorption in "the trivial
round, the common task : " from slavery to
palpable facts and utilitarian fallacies. Dickens
did more than any one else to deHver the common
people from this debased and vulgar positivism.
30 DICKENS. [lect.
He is the great minister of the ideal to the masses.
He is their Homer.
But there is another sense in which we may
call Dickens "The Humourist as Democrat."
Throughout the whole of his literary life he
fought strenuously for the elevation and enfran-
chisement of the masses ; for moral, social, and
political reform. He called himself a Eadical.
And so he was, not in the sense the word
bears in our party politics, which he ever regarded
with contempt and loathing, but in the sense
of desiring to lay the axe of reform to the root
of existing abuses. From party contests he stood
aloof. He thought party leaders indifferent to
what he called — he had learnt the phrase from
Carlyle — "the condition of England question,"
and intent merely on dishing their adversaries, and
on obtaining or retaining j^lace and power. And
this awakened — what wonder ? — his honest scorn
and indignation. From time to time attempts
were made to induce him to stand for Parliament.
He resisted them with something of vehemence.
" I declare " — this was his language to certain
influential members of a London constituency who
approached him with such a request — "I declare
that as to all matters on the face of this teeming
earth, .it appears to me that the House of Com-
mons and Parliament altogether is become just
the dreariest failure and nuisance that ever
bothered this much-bothered world." And in a
I.] TRUE BADICALISM. 31
letter written in 1854, speaking of a certain
literary project, lie said, "I gave up with it my
hope to have made every man in England feel
something of the contempt for the House of
Commons that I have. We shall never do any-
thing until this sentiment is universal." But,
while he turned in loathing from "the din of
vociferous platitude and quack out-bellowing
quack" within those walls at Westminster, he
was from first to last indefatigably active in the
cause of real reform. Nor was it in vain that he
insisted on the duties of society towards the poor,
that he pleaded for the protection of women and
children, that he sought to ameliorate the relations
between workpeople and their employers, that he
inveighed against cruelty in schools, in workhouses,
against the law's delays — so scandalous when he
began to write — against the frauds of company
promoters, the abuses of sinecures, the hypocrisies
of false philanthropy and false religionism, the
How-not-to-do-it of the Circumlocution Office.
And here let it be noted that Dickens did all this
good work naturally and unaffectedly. One cannot
help being struck by the ease wherewith he intro-
duces into his grotesque or pathetic creations some
political, social, or moral theme. From first to
last, he was one of the simplest and least pretentious
of men.
What shall we say, then, will be Dickens's
32 DICKENS. [lect.
permanent place in English literature ? Perhaps
the time has not as yet come when this question
can be answered. "The balance in which the
works of the masters are weighed, vibrates long
before it is finally adjusted." It is hard to believe
that so much genius as Dickens undoubtedly pos-
sessed, should fail to keep his books alive. Cer-
tainly the sale of them is still immense. He is
hardly less popular with the masses now than he
ever was. That is evident from the great demand
for his writings in our Public Libraries. Among
the more cultivated, his popularity is undoubtedlj^
on the decline. He reposes undisturbed on the
shelves of libraries in country houses. One does
not see him in the hands of our young men at
public schools or universities. I heard the other
day of an Eton boy, a very clever boy, the son of
an artist, a friend of my own, who was asked by
his father if he had ever read Dickens. He
replied, ''No." ''Well," said the father, "you
really ought; try Pichvick.'' The boy tried
Picktvick, and, after getting through half a
volume, came back to his father, saying, " Do you
really wish me to go on with it ? I will if you
do; but I don't care for it." The truth is that
it is form which gives vitality to a book. And
Dickens is grievously wanting in form. Moreover,
we must remember that Dickens's sentimental
reahsm is not the highest order of romantic fiction.
He is, however, by far the greatest of its English
I.] "EVEBT INCH OF HIM AN HONEST 31 AN" 33
exponents. And tliat proceeds from what I may-
call the power of his poetic hallucination, the
musicalness of his phrase, and, above all, from
the personal emotion, the realized experience of
suffering and sadness, which breathe through his
pages. To which I may add that, unlike Victor
Hugo, whom in many points he resembles, he
never falsifies our sympathies. " Everj^- inch of
him an honest man," wrote Carlyle, on receiving
the tidings of his death. Now Goethe has
said that apart from the ethical sentiment the
actual is the vulgar, the low, the gross. The
ethical sentiment breathes throughout the pages
of Dickens, and it may well cover a multitude of
sins of taste. Whatever the judgment of posterity
may be upon him, we may to-day take leave of
him with that judgment of Carlyle, " Every inch
of him an honest man."
LECTUEE II.
THE HUMOUEIST AS PHILOSOPHEE.
THA CKEBA Y.
( 37 )
LECTUEE II.
THE HUMOURIST AS PHILOSOPHER.
TEACKEBAY.
M. Taine, in his very valuable and suggestive
work on English Literature, introduces what he
has to say about Thackeray by a comparison
between him and Dickens, which I will read.
It is as follows : —
" The one more ardent, more expansive, wholly
given up to verve, an impassioned painter of crude
and dazzling pictures, a lyric prose-writer, all
powerful in provoking laughter or tears, plunged
into fantastic invention, painful sensibility, vehe-
ment buffoonery ; and by the boldness of his style,
the excess of his emotions, the grotesque familiarity
of his caricatures, he has displayed aU the forces
and weaknesses of an artist, all the audacities, all
the successes, and all the oddities of the imagina-
tion. The other, more self-contained, better in-
structed and stronger, a lover of moral dissertations,
a counsellor of the public, a sort of lay-preacher,
less bent on defending the poor, more bent on
censuring man, has brought to the aid of satire a
sustained common-sense, great knowledge of the
38 THACKEBAY. [lect.
heart, consummate cleverness, powerful reasoning,
a store of meditated hatred, and has persecuted
vice with all the weapons of reflection."
M. Taine then goes on to charge Thackeray with
having converted the novel into satire — urged
thereto partly by the manners of his country,
partly by his own temperament. Thackeray, he
complains, instead of contemplating the passions
as poetic forms, contemplates them as moral
qualities. This, he says, is in accordance with the
English taste. And in order to illustrate that
view, he goes on to consider the French taste.
The French like a novel to be amusing and poUte,
he tells us. They would feel hurt if the writers
tried to force their convictions by blows struck
home (a coups presses) and by solid arguments,
by a display of eloquence and indignation. If
you speak to them of human wickedness — this I
may remark, parenthetically, the French novelist
generally does — it must be not to teach but to
divert them. The EngHsh are endowed with a
grosser, a less mercurial temperament, which is
nourished by a heavier and stronger diet. He
quotes from Thackeray's own Book of Snobs the
dictum that "their usual expression [is one] of
intense gloom and subdued agony." They like
strong emotions, precise demonstrations. These
Thackeray ministers to them with both hands.
He gives them the kind of grave, pungent, forcible
satire they delight in.
n.] TAINE'S INDICTMENT. • 39
M. Taine then institutes a comparison between
Thackeray and Balzac. Balzac, he says, makes
you feel like a naturalist who has been conducted
through a museum possessing a fine collection of
specimens and monsters. You rise from reading
Thackeray feeling like a stranger who has been
taken into the operating room of a hospital on a
day when amputations are performed there. In
Thackeray he finds the most terrible cynicism, as
he might expect to find in one whom he describes
as the first of Swift's disciples. In both Swift
and Thackeray he discerns not only the same
misanthropy, but the same imperturbable gravity,
the same soUdity of conception, the same talent of
illusion. He confesses, indeed, that Thackeray's
misanthropy is not so thoroughgoing as Swift's.
But he considers the beings whose tenderness and
goodness Thackeray celebrates — Amelia Sedley,
Ethel Newcome, Laura, for example — infinitely
contemptible ; their love and their goodness, bhnd,
instinctive, unreasonable, and ridiculous. Further,
Taine finds that Thackeray regards social inequality
as a fertile source of injustice, vice, folly; and
attributes to him a wish to level down distinctions
of rank. " His novels," we are told, " are a war
against the upper classes of his country." Finally
— and now we come to the root of the matter —
Taine insists that the novelist ought to be *' a
psychologist and nothing more ; " ''a psychologist
who naturally and involuntarily puts psychology
40 THACKEBAY. [lect.
in action," painting the passions, the sentiments
of the soul as they are, and not troubling himself
about their ethical worth or significance.
In fact, M. Taine proclaims the "art for art"
doctrine, which has of late years been carried to
such lengths, and which M. de Maupassant has
more succinctly formulated than any one else I
know of. " Morality, goodness (I'honnetete), sound
principles, are things indispensable to the mainte-
nance of the established social order ; but there
is nothing in common between the social order
and literature; " a strong statement, to which M.
Taine, in his quality of historian, might, perhaps,
have demurred. M. Taine concludes his criticism
of Thackeray by comparing Becky Sharp with
Valerie Marneffe, very much to Becky's disadvan-
tage. He feels especially injured by the moral
reflections, the philosophical meditations, with
which Thackeray's novels are interspersed. It
would be easy, he complains, to extract from them
one or two volumes of ethical essays after the
manner of La Bruyere or Addison. In short, M.
Taine finds in Thackeray The Humourist as Philo-
sopher, and is offended at him.
I have been led to dweU at this length upon
Taine's indictment of Thackeray, because I think
it sums up with singular vigour and directness
what has been said, in substance, by a multitude
II.] THE NOVEL AND ETHICS. 41
of less able critics. I have a great respect for
Taine, whom I regard as, in sorae ways, the first
among French men of letters in this centmy. I
may add that, slight as was my acquaintance with
him, I had also a gi'eat regard for, and a great
sympathy with him. And before forming my own
judgment on any subject concerning which he has
written, I like to see what he has said about it.
Now his indictment of Thackeray appears to me
quite wrong. And the error comes from this : that
here — as not infrequently happened — Taine was
the slave of a formula. I shall notice, incidentally,
in the course of this Lecture, his complaints of
Thackeray's misanthropy and cynicism, of the
insignificance of Thackeray's characters, of
Thackeray's levelling tendencies. But before I
go further, I should like to devote a few minutes
to examining the question of the relations between
the novel and ethics, a question on which I find
myself differing altogether with M. Taine.
Is it true, then, that the novel is independent of
the great laws and principles of ethics ? I think
it is quite untrue. The novelist is a psychologist,
Taine tells us. Very well. I have no objection
to calling him so. But what is psychology ? The
word denotes that branch of philosophy — ttjs xpvxyj's
\6yo<s — which studies the ^vxij, the human mind or
soul ; the thinking principle by which I feel, know,
and will, and by which my body is animated. I am
following the dictum of Cicero which I quoted in
42 THACKERAY. [lect.
beginning my last Lecture. And even this definition
is enough to bring M. Taine and myself to the
parting of the ways. Taine, indeed, speaks of the
soul; but — I have in my memory a passage of
his book on Intelligence — he warns you that you
must take it as no more than a poetical expression,
a rhetorical figure. For him, what is called mental
activity is really sensuous consciousness. Eeason,
intelhgence, will, personality, are for him mere
metaphors. He explains them by mechanism and
movement. The intellect is to him a thinking
machine, just as the stomach is a digesting
machine. M. Taine belongs to a school — it is a
numerous and an influential school, though the
majority of its members have not his courage and
his logic — who use physiological phraseology to
describe mental states ; who, in fact, make psy-
chology a subordinate department of biology, who
reduce it to molecular physics. Now, if we are
so to account of psychology, no doubt the ethical
idea is an intruder there. Physical science is
wholly the science of the senses, and the senses
know nothing of justice and injustice, right and
wrong, moral good and moral evil. If the novelist
is a psychologist, in this physiological sense, and
nothing more, I grant that he is not concerned
with ethics ; for ethics, in any true meaning of the
word, do not exist for him.
But that is not what I mean by soul. I hold
that the soul, mind, or thinking principle, is a real
II.] WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY? 43
indivisible agent, and that it is a man's true self.
So, you will remember, the ghost of Scipio is stated
to have testified, "You are not what that outward
form reveals, but a man's mind is his true self;
not that shape which may be pointed at with the
finger." And by psychology I do not mean a
history of phenomena, conventionally styled psy-
chical, but really physical. No : I mean a science
of the mind or soul ; that is, a knowledge of the
facts concerning it, as underlain by principles. And
the true starting-point in this science I take to
be that unity of the ,Ego which phenomenalists
and sensationalists put aside. This is what I
mean by psychology ; and regarding the novelist
as a psychologist in this sense — he may very
properly be so regarded — I say that he is con-
cerned with men, not as mere matter in motion,
but as animated by minds or souls. And the
very first fact about the mind or soul, is that it
is endowed with perceptions of right and wrong,
justice and injustice, and the like. Aristotle
pointed that out two thousand years ago. Man is
an ethical animal. The word " ethical " indicates
his differentia from other animals. I say, if you
survey man from the point of view of psychology,
which is really such, you cannot ignore conscience,
the power of volition, the moral sentiments, moral
habits, moral responsibility. They are psychical
facts — not poetical expressions — and primary
psychical facts. The moral law is the atmosphere
44 THACKERAY. [lect.
of man's psychical being. You cannot make ab-
straction of the moral law, if you wish to examine
him psychologically, any more than you can ex-
haust the air of the chamber in which he is, if
you wish to examine him physically. Man, apart
from the moral law, is not man at all, but a
mere primat among the animals, which you may
class as biped, bimanous, and so forth, and of
which this is the whole account.
That is my first point. The novelist is a
psychologist in the proper sense of the word.
And the novel should be, so to speak, the image
of the human soul. Now what are the elements
of a good novel ? They are mainly two : Truth
and Passion. The first thing a novelist needs, the
sine qua non of his equipment for his task, is the
perception of the true. And by the true I mean
the double character of ideality and phenomenality
possessed by all human things. The essence of
romantic fiction, I say, is the close union of all the
elements of the composition with the ideal which
they contain. From this union of the ideal and
phenomenal, a novel derives that character of truth
which touches us by its relation with our double
nature. A mere dramatic or " realistic " recital of
events is not enough. No ; nor is the painting of
society in its various aspects. There must be an
ethical element of some sort in a novel if it is to
be true to life, if it is to be really human ; for man
is an ethical animal. That is his great distinction
II.] THE VOCATION OF TEE NOVELIST. 45
among the animals. Of all human ideals, the
moral comes first, because all other ideals hold
of it. The moral ideal embraces our entire being :
all other ideals only segments thereof. The
morality of a novel niay be true or false. It may
refine and elevate. It may disturb and darken
the judgment by flattering the passions. But a
morality of some sort, true or false, genuine or
spurious, it must have.
What then is the true vocation of the artist in
romantic fiction ? I say that his true vocation —
it is the true vocation of all artists — is to elevate,
to idealize, to refine. Here, indeed, is the real
distinction between art and physical science. To
physical science nothing is filthy or impure. The
student in its domain takes all the facts, and
catalogues them, in the order of their importance,
and reduces them to formulas. He deals with
matter. Ethics is a sphere into which he does
not enter. Far otherwise is it with the artist
working in the domain of romantic fiction. In
the first place, he is not concerned with all the
facts. His work is essentially poetical. And the
primary duty of the poet is choice, which is
governed by the eternal laws, the necessary con-
ventions, ruHng throughout the world of art. The
great ethical principles of reserve, respect, reverence,
shame, which have their endless applications in
civilized life, prescribe limits to imagination as
to action. I quite admit — I said so just now
46 THACKEBAY. [lect.
— that passions are largely and most legitimately
the subject of the novelist. All I contend for is
that he should treat the passions as an artist, not
as a physiologist.
I may be excused for expatiating on this matter
a little. It is quite germane to my subject, and
we can hardly overrate its practical importance.
In this age of ours art appeals to men and women,
most widely and most powerfully, under the form
of literature. Poetry, the drama, romantic fiction,
which is really a development of the drama — for
what is the modern novel but an unacted play ? —
fill a large space in the Hves of multitudes who
never look intelligently upon a picture or a statue.
But where the poet or the dramatist counts his
votaries by thousands, the popular novelist counts
his by hundreds of thousands — I might, perhaps,
say by millions. There can hardly be a more
important practical question than that of the
ethos of a widely read work of romantic fiction.
And it is in the author's treatment of his subject,
rather than in his choice of personages, his plot, or
his catastrophe, that the ethos of his work comes
out. M. Taine will have it that the function of
the novel is not didactic. Well, I admit that the
ethical reflections of some novehsts are a mere
excrescence on their story — I am supposing a
genuine story teller — and only serve to darken
it ; like the prosings of too many a preacher
on the text he has never really understood. I
n.] THE BOOT OF TEE MATTEB. 47
allow, or rather maintain, that to convert the
novel into a moral sermon, dealing, as sermons
too often do, with individua vaga, with untrue
types, is fatally to pervert it from its purpose.
Certainly, however, the novelist is concerned not
only with the exterior incidents of the lives of men,
but also with their interior springs of action. The
great majority of people are incapable of under-
standing a principle until its light falls upon a fact.
It is for the great majority that the novelist wiites.
And if he likes to point his moral or adorn his tale
by occasional reflections, I can't in the least see
why he should not.
I add that the true test of the ethical merit
or demerit of any work of fiction is this : What is
the impression that it leaves upon a healthy
mind — a mind infected neither by prudery nor by
pruriency, which are but different forms of the
same disease. Unquestionably this general canon
may be laid down : that, in a work of art the
depicting of deformity and evil is admissible
only as it serves to bring beauty and goodness
into stronger relief. Kant, in a pregnant passage
of his Critique of Judgment, remarks, '' Only the
productions of liberty, that is, of a volition which
founds itself upon reason, ought properly to be
called art." Note the words " a volition which
founds itself upon reason." This dictum goes to
the root of the matter. The novelist and his
readers are alike under that moral law which is
48 THACKEBAY. [lect.
a permanent revelation of the reason. He is
moralty responsible for what he wills to write,
they are morally responsible for what they will
to read — if, indeed, we possess any true power
to will. Free-will is the real starting-point of the
controversy. If we may choose what we will
habitually dwell upon in our thoughts — and no
man who has not sophisticated his reason away
can doubt that this is largely in our power — the
question arises, whether we have any right to be
indifferent to the sort of facts with which we
surround ourselves, which we contemplate, and
which leave their impression, through the channel
of the senses, upon the hidden man of the heart ?
Is it enough that a thing should be true, to justify
us in considering it in all its bearings, and in
surrendering ourselves to all its fascinations ? I
say that there are truths which it is well not to
know, and which it is a duty not to dwell upon
more than we are obliged, if we do know them ;
truths which tend to debase and destroy a being
like man, who is constituted not only of spirit,
but of spirit and sense.
And applying this to the theme before us, I say
that in a work of fiction the sensuous impression
should not overpower the spiritual ; and that,
if it does, we have a bad book. Certainly the
novel must be true to life. It must not put
darkness for light, or light for darkness. It must
represent the darkness and the light as they are.
n.] THE PASSION OF SEXUAL LOVE. 49
A work of imagination should not obtrude the
moral sentiment. To employ it for the establish-
ment of a thesis isi fatally to pervert it from its
true function. Flaubert says, justly, ''A work
of art designed to prove anything, nullifies itself."
Let the literary artist body forth things as they
are in this confused drama of existence, subject
only to the reservations which the essential laws
of art impose. Those, "bad good books," as
they have been' called, which out of respect for
Mr. Podsnap's "young person," at whom we
glanced in the last Lecture, or out of tenderness
for " the Nonconformist conscience," depict things
as they are not, stand condemned by the first
principles of literary ethics, for they are wanting
in the primary element of morality, which is truth.
This discussion has carried me further than I
had intended. Let me close it by a practical illus-
tration of my meaning. I said just now that truth
and passion are the elements of a novel ; that life
is made up of the phenomenal and the ideal, and
that the noveUst must be true to both. Well, his
main theme is, and ever must be, the passion of
sexual love ; the most universal, the most im-
perious of human sentiments. But love for
him, a psychologist, is not what it is for a
physiologist — a mere animal impulse which men
possess in common with moths and mollusca.
He is concerned with this most potent instinct as
transformed, whether in greater or less degree, by
E
50 THACKEBAY. [lect.
the imaginative faculty ; he is concerned with it
as an artist, whether, dealing with it in its illicit
manifestations, he exhibits it as the bane and blight
of life, or depicts it in its pure and worthy expres-
sion as the supreme instrument
*' Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words
And love of truth, and all that makes a man."
Such is the conception of the relation of the
novel to ethics, which I am led to oppose to that
put forward by M. Taine. But M. Taine, as we
saw, appeals to Balzac. Well, I agree with Taine
in regarding Balzac as the greatest master of
romantic fiction the world has ever seen. No
doubt Balzac's judgment in this matter is entitled
to much weight. But I remember that Balzac
wrote, " The law of the novel is to tend to the
beau ideal, ''^ and again, " To moralize his epoch is
the end which every literary artist should propose
to himself." How far this incomparable genius
contributed to moralize his epoch, how far he
is open to the impeachment that his virtue, after
all, is only an obscene virtue, are questions that
I cannot now discuss. The crudities of descrip-
tion which he sometimes permits himself I shall
not attempt to justify. It is enough for my
present purpose that I find this greatest master
in romantic fiction expressly formulating that view
of the relation of the novel to ethics for which
I am contending. '' Great works of imagination,"
II.] A GBEAT DEAL IN COMMON WITH BALZAC. 61
he writes, " subsist by their passionate side. But
passion is excess, is evil. The writer has nobly
accomplished his task, when, not setting aside
this essential element of his work, he accom-
panies it with a great moral lesson."
And now to come to Thackeray. Assuredly
he is very far inferior to Balzac in genius. Nor
has he Balzac's talent. He has not that grasp
of principles, that faculty of co-ordination, that
power of generalization, which Balzac possessed
in such ample measure. But he had naturally
a great deal in common with Balzac : originality
of intellect, perspicuity of observation, a warm
and potent instinct — if I may so speak — of
practical life, of all its conditions, and of all
its contrasts. Like Balzac, too, he possessed a
certain divinatory power, a sort of gift of moral
second sight. Mrs. Kitchie, in her fascinating
book, which all the world has just been reading,
Chapters from Some Memoirs, tells us that, " he
sometimes spoke of a curious uncomfortable feel-
ing he had about some people, as if uncomfortable
facts in their history were actually revealed to
him," a feeling which was afterwards, not un-
frequently, justified. It is a curious gift and a
note of the highest genius.
Such were some of Thackeray's more striking
natural endowments, fitting him for his work as
52 THACKEBAT. [lect.
a humourist. No intellectual training could have
supplied their place. But without intellectual
training they would have profited him less. It
was his good fortune — unlike Dickens — to receive,
first at the Charterhouse and then at Cambridge,
that instruction in the " humanities," as the
fine old word is, which appears to me an in-
comparable instrument of intellectual culture.
Thackeray was a well-read, though not an exact
classical scholar. And I agree with his biographer,
Mr. Herman Merivale, that *' the impress of a
classical training is on every line of his work,
in its force of ideas, its scholarliness of thought,
its simplicity of expression." He left Cambridge
after two years' residence, not staying to take
his degree, and travelled in Germany, where he
spent some time at Weimar, " dear little Weimar
town " he calls it, in one of his Boundabout
Papers — making there the acquaintance of the
great Goethe himself. He became very fairly
versed in the German language, then an unusual
acquirement, and made himself well acquainted
with the great German poets. In French literature
he was still better read. After his return from
Weimar he kept terms at one of the Inns of
Court — I forget whether it was the Inner or the
Middle Temple. I believe, but am not quite
sure, that he was eventually called to the Bar.
I do not suppose that he acquired much know-
ledge of law, while a law student. But he
n.] THE BEPBOOF OF CHANCE. 53
certainly did acquire a knowledge of tlie world
and of character, wMch we may regard as, in some
sort, the completion of his education.
This was Thackeray's intellectual preparation
for the work to which he was destined. And
now he was to undergo a moral discipline that
was also part of his training for it. In 1833
he appears to have lost the greater part of his
fortune — £20,000 it is said to have been — some
of it at play, some of it in two unsuccessful
newspapers, in which he invested money. He
was then twenty-two years old. It is a fine
saying of Shakespeare, " in the reproof of chance
lies the true proof of men." Without that loss
of fortune, probably, nay, almost certainly, we
should never have had Thackeray's contributions
to EngKsh hterature. He was, by nature, very
indolent, and required the spur of necessity to
urge him to his destined course. He looked
about him for his work in the world. At first
he thought of adopting art as a profession, and
proposed, unsuccessfully, to illustrate one of
Dickens's books, then appearing in monthly
numbers. Gradually it came home to him that
literature, not art, was his true vocation. Some
of his earliest work appears to have been done
for Fraser's Magazine. He appears side by side
with Coleridge and Carlyle, in Maclise's picture
of the contributors to that journal, published with
the number for January, 1835. In 1836 he
54 THACKEBAT. [lect.
married. He was then twenty-five years of age.
I will read the account he gives of his marriage
in a letter written long afterwards.
'' I married at your age, with .£400 paid by a
newspaper which failed six months afterwards,
and always love to hear of a young fellow testing
his fortune bravely in that way. If I can see
my way to help you, I will. Though my marriage
was a wreck, as you know, I would do it over
again, for behold Love is the crown and com-
pletion of all earthly good. A man who is afraid
of his fortune never deserved one. I wish you
the very best. The very best and pleasantest
house I ever knew in my life had but £300 to
keep it."
Thackeray's happiness in his marriage appears
to have been unmixed. But out of it was to
come a far more terrible trouble than his loss of
fortune. In 1840 Mrs. Thackeray lost her
reason. From that time she had to live apart
from her husband, whom she survived for many
years. No greater sorrow could have befallen
Thackeray, a man of singularly warm affections,
of most tender and sensitive heart. Writing
shortly afterwards to a friend, whose wife had
recently died, he says, " A dead sorrow is better
than a living one," surely one of the most pathetic
laments ever uttered. But the effect of this
living sorrow was to deepen and strengthen his
character. He had his children to provide for.
II.] LITEBABY APPBENTICESHIP. 55
He liad his own work in the world to find and to
do. He sought it diligently, and did it with all
his might. His Uterary apprenticeship, as I may
call it, before he was recognized as master of his
craft, lasted some twelve or thirteen years. They
were years of unremitting labour. Necessity was
laid upon him. In 1841 Edward Fitzgerald
writes, '' Have you read Thackeray's little book,
The Second Funeral of Na]joleon? If not, pray
do ; and buy it, as each copy sold puts seven-
pence halfpenny into Thackeray's pocket, which
is not very heavy just now, I take it." In 1844
Fitzgerald describes him as " writing hard for
half a dozen reviews and newspapers all the
morning ; dining, drinking, and talking at night ;
managing to preserve a fresh colour and per-
petual flow of spirits under a wear and tear of
thinking and feeding that would have knocked
up any other man I know, two years ago at least."
How good, on the whole, his work belonging to
this period is, I need hardly say. One cannot
but wonder that its merit was so little recognized.
Even Barry Lyndon, which is certainly a master-
piece, attracted little notice when it first appeared
in Fraser's Magazine in 1844. In 1845 we find
Macvey Napier, then editor of the Edinburgh
Bevieiv, inquiring of Hayward whether Thack-
eray was likely to be good for a light article for
that journal. It was in 1846 that Thackeray
began, in Punch, the Snob Papers, which were
56 THACKEBAY. [lect.
said to have made the reputation, both of Punch
and of himself.
And here let me say a word, in passing, about
this Booh of 87iobs, which I regard as a master-
piece of humour. Its playfulness is, of course, of
the satiric kind. The keen and vivacious satire of
an accomplished man of the world is Thackeray's
distinctive note as a humourist. The picture
which the BooTc of Snohs presents does not pretend
to strict accuracy. No satirist is tied to exact
presentment of the facts. You remember the
demand which the humomist in As You Lihe It
makes for himself —
" I must have liberty
Withal, as largo a charter as the wind,
To blow on whom I will ; for so fools have :
Invest me in my motley ; give me leave
To speak my mind, and I will, through and through,
Cleanse the foul body of the infected world.
If they will patiently receive my medicine."
There is exaggeration, there is caricature, in
the Book of Snobs. But it is substantially true.
It is a very direct, a very amusing, and I will
add, a very philosophical indictment of a specially
English vice — a dominant vice, we may say, of
the English mind, an unreasonable deference for
artificial superiorities. But Taine is grotesquely
in error in supposing that Thackeray was a
leveller, that he desii^ed to reduce society to an
enforced and unnatural uniformity. He knew
perfectly well that society is necessarily hier-
archical. He saw clearly that the right divine of
II.] THE BOOK OF SNOBS. 57
true and natural superiority is indefeasible ; lie
saw, with equal clearness, that the undivine right
of false and artificial superiority is doomed. Of
gentle birth and cultivated tastes, Thackeray was,
in the best sense of the word, aristocratic. That
did not in the least prevent him from recognizing
that the old order of caste and privilege was
gone. He knew well that the great French
Eevolution, which had become a European, a
world-wide revolution, meant so much. In words
which M. Taine has quoted from the BooJc of
SnobSf Thackeray observes — with entire truth
— that the problem lying before the world is
the organization of equality. Mark the word
" organization," which means " forming organi-
cally." Thackeray was perfectly well aware that
society is an organism : not a chaotic mass of
equivalent human units; and that in every
organism we must have complexity, differentia-
tion, gradation, subordination. For the rest, it
must be remembered that in his maturer life,
Thackeray recognized the language of his earlier
ardour in the Book of Snobs as too vehement. To
which I may add that he was not singular in his
failure to discern the importance of the principle
of heredity. Hardly any one then recognized it.
Certain it is, however, that the BooJc of Snobs did
a vast deal of practical good. It helped to abate
the meanness, the serviHty, the vulgarity, which
it painted in such vivid colours.
58 THACKEBAY. [lect.
Vanity Fair appeared in January, 1847, a date
ever memorable to Thackeray, for it marked his
advent from obscurity and poverty to fame and
comparative affluence. Mrs. Carlyle, after reading
a few numbers of it, wrote to her husband, " Very
good, indeed. Beats Dickens out of the world."
Certainly it stamped its author as one of the
greatest painters of manners that has ever adorned
our literature. The simpleness and directness with
which the story is told, the naturalness with
which the incidents follow one another, the easy
vigour with which the action is carried on, re-
vealed the consummate literary artist. Perhaps in
Vanity Fair the characters are more sharply and
deeply cut than in any other of his works ; per-
haps in it his delicate and sensitive apprehension
of the distinguishing traits of human nature, is
most fully displayed. But his later books — I need
not dwell upon them, as they are so familiar to
us all — worthily sustained the reputation which
Vanity Fair achieved. Esmond, I suppose, is
generally accounted the most perfect, artistically,
of his fictions. Certainly nowhere is the master's
touch lighter and surer. I should say it is the
truest book ever written in an essentially false
style ; for so I, personally, account the historical
novel. It is notable how again and again in
Esmond the spirit of the nineteenth century
breaks out through the phraseology and costumes
and general life environment of the eighteenth.
II.] SUPBEME VEBACITY. 59
We are of our age, and cannot help ourselves.
We look at another age with larger eyes than
the men and women who lived in it.
Before, however, I quit the consideration of
Thackeray's literary art, there are two observa-
tions which I should like to make ; two which,
indeed, run into one. The first is that his
singular perfection of style — unequalled by anj^
contemporary writer, Carlyle judged — came from
his supreme veracity. He possessed the great,
the rare gift of precise expression. The phrase
fits the thought as a well-made glove the hand.
I add that the intrinsic charm of his stories
comes from this same gift of veracity. Thackeray
was a serious observer of life and of the play of
the passions, without the least tendency to melo-
drama. There are no plots in his novels, any
more than there are in Balzac's. His fictions are,
as a rule, perfectly adapted to reason and to the
general aspect of life. He depicted society as he
saw it, with supreme truthfulness — that is, so far
as he dared. There were sides of it which he
dared not depict, unlike Balzac, *' qui cherchait et
osait tout," as George Sand truly said. Like
Balzac, too, he is fond of minutiae. It may be
said of him, as of that great master, " II dccrit
trop." But how admirably his descriptions are
done ! His observation is conducted with so fine
an art, that one hardly knows where reality ends
and fiction begins. It is not the likeness of
60 THACKERAY. [lect.
mechanical copying, sucli as the photographer
gives, but the luminous and captivating picture of
an artist, who creates. The phenomena of social
life left a clear image on his mind. And he
reproduces that image with admirable force and
picturesqueness. There are however passages in
his works — this is not generally recognized —
which exhibit him as a no less excellent painter
of landscape than of portrait. Let me read one
which depicts, very vividly, a scene famihar,
doubtless, to most here.
"Pleasant Ehine gardens! Fair scenes of
peace and sunshine ; noble purple mountains,
whose crests are reflected in the magnificent
stream ; who has ever seen you that has not a
grateful memory of those scenes of friendly repose
and beauty ? To lay down the pen, and even to
think of beautiful Ehineland, makes one happy.
At this time of summer evening the cows are
trooping down from the hills, lowing, and with
their bells tinkhng, to the old town, with its old
moats, and gates, and spires, and chestnut trees,
with long blue shadows stretching over the grass ;
the sky and the river below flame in crimson and
gold; and the moon is already out, looking pale
towards the sunset. The sun sinks behind the
great castle-crested mountains ; the night falls
suddenly ; the river grows darker and darker ;
hghts quiver in it from the windows in the old
ramparts, and twinkle peacefully in the villages
under the hills on the opposite shore."
II.] PAINTS LIFE AS IT IS. 61
I call that an admirable bit of pmjsage. It is
like a landscape of Nicolas Ponssin.
But — this is my special concern to-day — we
have in Thackeray a tj^pe of The Humourist as
Philosopher. Thackeray then, I would remark,
draws for us no individuum vagum, but man the
social animal, the ethical animal, as he lives and
moves and has his being, with his aims, affec-
tions, affectations, afflictions, in civil society, which,
again, is an ethical organism. Thackeray paints
life, I say, as it is. And he knew well that human
existence rests upon elementary moralities, upon
primary ethical verities. His books are his ex-
periences of life, his observations of life, his medi-
tations on life, dramatized, so to speak, and put
upon his mimic stage. And the ethos of the
drama is ethical. He is ever a moral philosopher.
I do not, of course, ascribe to him philosophy in
the narrow and technical sense of the word. I
question whether he had ever looked into a book
of metaphysics ; whether he would even have
understood the terms we use in discussing meta-
physical questions. He was a philosopher in the
wider sense indicated by Plato in a famous passage
of the fifth book of the Bepublic — the sense of a
genuine lover of wisdom, of an eager student of
real existence ; and his philosophy of life — Lehens-
pMlosopMe — comes into special prominence in all
tJ2 THACKEBAY. [lect.
his writings, and is his distinguishing characteristic.
The love of morahzing was very strong in him.
He calls himself, as we saw in the last Lecture,
" the week-day preacher." His philosophy is
what I may term intuitional, anticipated, un-
systematized philosophy. He has a serious view
of life — Weltanschauung, as the Germans say — and
he ever keeps it before him. M. Taine regards
this as a capital blemish. I consider it a peculiar
merit.
I shall inquire, presently, of what kind
Thackeray's philosophy of life was. First let
me say what it was not. There are those — Taine
is among them — who find him a misanthrope ; a
charge which, by the way, was brought against
Balzac. The accusation seems to me wholly un-
just in both cases. To speak of Thackeray merely,
he drew the world around him as he saw it, ex-
tenuating nothing, but, assuredly, setting down
nothing in malice. He saw clearly enough — as
who that has eyes must not see ? — the seamy side
of society : its littleness, its meanness, its selfish-
ness, its baseness, its false religionism, its secret
impurities — in a word which sums all up, its world-
liness. I remember hearing a very learned and
pious divine, the late Father Dalgairns, once tell
a particularly smart congregation, " society is the
devil's church." I do not know whether Thackeray
would have gone so far as that. Certainly, how-
ever. Vanity Fair might stand as the title of every
II.] NOT A DISCIPLE OF SWIFT. 63
one of his books. But clearly as lie saw, and
vividly as he painted, the seamy side of society,
he was no misanthrope, as Taine fancies. He saw
with equal clearness, and painted with equal vivid-
ness, the truth and incorruptness, the purity and
goodness, the love and pity which exist side by
side with the abounding evil. He discerned in
these things the real goods of human existence,
and felt for them that reverence which Euskin has
happily called "the chief joy and power of life."
Taine seems to me particularly unhappy in calling
him a disciple of Swift. In my judgment there is
hardly anything in common between his genial
humour and the sceva indignatio, the savage
wrath, of that arch-inquisitor of human nature.
Pungent as his satke often was, the man was
overflowing with the milk of human kindness.
"If Fun is good. Truth is still better, and Love
is the best of all," are the words with which he
concludes his Booh of Snobs. They seem to me
an accurate expression of his mind.
Again, I cannot agree with Taine in his com-
plaint — which has been made by hundreds of others
— that the good people in Thackeray, if I may so
call them, are contemptible and uninteresting.
Colonel Newcome, George Warrington, nay, even
Arthur Pendennis, particularly interest me as
admirable specimens of what I take to be the
best kind of man now extant on this planet, the
English gentleman. And then his women, his
64 THACKEBAY. [lect.
good women. Surely Amelia Sedley is the very
type of all that is " pure womanly : " Laura, in
lier ''finished chasten'd purity," "the queen of
marriage ; " while in Ethel Newcome we have
" a perfect woman, nobly planned, to guide, to
counsel, and command." Thackeray, happily,
lived at a time before the strong-minded woman
had come into fashion — at a time when it was
generally received and believed that " woman is
not undeveloped man, but diverse."
But I am treading on dangerous ground. Let
me go on to notice another of Taine's complaints
of Thackeray, whom he finds a cynic. The com-
plaint is echoed by thousands, by hundreds of
thousands. I confess it seems to me that those
who make it, speak unadvisedly with their lips ;
that they have not realized what a cynic is. I
find no cynicism in Thackeray's pages. If you
want to see what real cynicism is, take up Candide.
In that incomparably witty book you have a per-
fect specimen of it. There Voltaire, under pre-
tence of stripping off our illusions, strips us of
our primary moral sympathies, of our fundamental
ethical beliefs. But it is precisely to those
sympathies and beliefs that Thackeray appeals,
" those high instincts," as Wordsworth calls them
in magnificent verse familiar, doubtless, to all
here —
" High instincts, before which onr mortal Nature
Did tremble, like a guilty Thing surprised,"
I.] TENDERNESS AND PATHOS. 65
and which are the most certain of all our cer-
tainties. To those sympathies, beliefs, instincts,
I say, Thackeray ever appealed, to recall us from
the worship of Mammon, the worship of rank, the
worship of notoriety, to the worship of goodness,
and truth, and love. Nor is it true, as Taine
complains, that he has turned the novel into mere
satire. True it is that in him we have a satirist
who, to quote Pope's description of Horace, " with-
out method talks us into sense." But true it is
also that beneath his satire, there are springs of
tenderness and pathos which are ever welling up.
He is full of those " thoughts that do often lie too
deep for tears." He knew well that we apprehend
moral verities not only with the intellect, but also
with the heart ; avv oXfj rrj xjjvxfjj as the Greeks
said ; with the whole of our spiritual being. Nor
let it be objected that he presents us with nothing
better than trite moralities, " copy-book maxims."
Sidney Smith, in whom the very voice of common
sense seems often to speak, has happily said, "It
is the calling of great men not so much to preach
new truths, as to rescue from oblivion those old
truths which it is our wisdom to remember and
our weakness to forget."
And now let us ask of what kind was his moral
philosophy. I answer, that it seems to me to
breathe the spirit of Immanuel Kant. We may
be quite sure that Thackeray had never read one
line of that master. But, as it was said of
F
66 THACKEEAY. [lect.
Descartes that he ruled the thought of the seven-
teenth century, so we may say that Kant rules the
thought of the nineteenth century. Despite the
repelhngness of his style — surely one of the most
abominable styles that any man ever wrote — Kant's
philosophy has penetrated everywhere. There
is hardly any poet, any critic, any historian, any
writer of any kind of our day, in whom his influence
may not be traced. Thackeray's philosophy of life
I find underlain by three great philosophical prin-
ciples which most probably he could not have
formulated, and which are distinctly Kantian.
The first is the cardinal truth of human person-
ality, regarded, you will remember, by Kant
as a postulate of the reason, belonging to the
intelligible world beyond space and time. Con-
sider this passage of Pendennis.
" Thus, friendly readers, we see how every
man in the world has his own private griefs and
business, by which he is more cast down or occu-
pied than by the affairs or sorrows of any other
person. While Mrs. Pendennis is disquieting
herself about losing her son, and that anxious
hold she has had of him, as long as he remained
in the mother's nest, whence he is about to take
flight into the great world beyond — while the
major's great soul chafes and frets, inwardly vexed
as he thinks what great parties are going on in
London, and that he might be sunning himself in
the glances of dukes and duchesses, but for those
cursed afl'airs which keep him in a wretched little
n.] HUMAN PEBSONALITY. 67
country liole — while Pen is tossing between his
passion and a more agreeable sensation, unac-
knowledged yet, but swaying him considerably,
namely, his longing to see the world — Mr. Smirke
has a private care watching at his bedside, and
sitting behind him on his pony; and is no more
satisfied than the rest of us. How lonely we are
in the world ! how selfesh and secret, everybody !
You and your wife have pressed the same pillow
for forty years and fancy yourselves united. — Psha !
Does she cry out when you have the gout, or do
you lie awake when she has the toothache ? Your
artless daughter, seemingly all innocence and
devoted to her mamma and her piano-lesson, is
thinking of neither, but of the young lieutenant
with whom she danced at the last ball — the honest
frank boy, just returning from school, is secretly
speculating upon the money you will give him,
and the debts he owes the tart-man. The old
grandmother crooning in the corner and bound to
another world within a few months, has some
business or cares which are quite private and her
own — very likely she is thinking of fifty years
back, and that night when she made such an im-
pression, and danced a cotillion with the captain
before your father proposed for her ; or, what a
silly little over-rated creature your wife is, and
how absurdly 5^0 u are infatuated about her — and,
as for your wife — philosophic reader, answer and
say, — Do you tell her all ? Ah, sir — a distinct
universe walks about under your hat and under
mine — all things in nature are difi'erent to each —
the woman we look at has not the same features,
68 TEACKEBAY. [lect.
the disli we eat from has not the same taste to the
one and the other — you and I are but a pair of
infinite isolations, with some fellow-islands a little
more or less near to us."
The last sentence seems to me to bring out
most powerfully a view of human personality which
a metaphysician would of course state somewhat
differently, but which is as substantially true as it
is powerfully expressed.
Next, I find Thackeray holding fast to the great
verity that life is a state of moral probation.
Kant's doctrine — it is the very kernel of his ethical
philosophy — is that knowledge is not man's
highest attribute ; that the will is higher than
the understanding; that practice is higher than
theory. " Man, limited strictly as a cognitive
being (ein erkennendes Wesen) to the world of
sense, reaches as an agent (ein handelndes Wesen)
far beyond : nay " — mark the words — '' nay, makes
proof of his higher nature in this, that he erects
himself above the world of sense. Therein con-
sists his autonomy or freedom." Now, probably
most of my hearers will remember a very interesting
passage in Pendennis, where Arthur Pendennis
expresses complete moral scepticism, scepticism
as to all first principles. Let us hear Thackeray
on that.
'' In these speculations and confessions of
Arthur, the reader may perhaps see allusions to
questions which, no doubt, have occupied and
n.j MOBAL PBOBATION. 69
discomposed himself, and which he may have
answered by very different sokitions to those come
to by onr friend. We are not pledging om-selves
for the correctness of his opinions, which readers
will please to consider are delivered dramatically,
the writer being no more answerable for them,
than for the sentiments uttered by any other
character of the story; our endeavour is merely
to follow out, in its progress, the development
of the mind of a worldly and selfish, but not
ungenerous or unkind or truth-avoiding man.
And it will be seen that the lamentable stage to
which his logic at present has brought him, is one
of general scepticism and sneering acquiescence
in the world as it is ; or if you hke so to call it,
a belief qualified with scorn in all things extant.
The tastes and habits of such a man prevent him
from being a boisterous demagogue, and his love
of truth and dislike of cant keep him from
advancing crude propositions, such as many loud
reformers are constantly ready with ; much more
of uttering downright falsehoods in urging ques-
tions or abusing opponents, which he would die
or starve rather than use. It was not in our
friend's nature to be able to utter certain lies ;
nor was he strong enough to protest against
others, except with a polite sneer; his maxim
being, that he owed obedience to all Acts of
Parliament, as long as they were not repealed.
"And to what does this easy and sceptical life
lead a man ? Friend Arthur was a Sadducee, and
the Baptist might be in the wilderness shouting
to the poor, who were listening with all their
70 THACKEBAT. [lect.
might and faith to the preacher's awful denuncia-
tions of wrath, or woe, or salvation ; and our
friend the Sadducee would turn his sleek mule
with a shrug and a smile from the crowd, and go
home to the shade of his terrace, and muse over
preacher and audience, and turn to his roll of
Plato, or his pleasant Greek song-book babbling
of honey and Hybla, and nymphs and fountains
of love. To what, we say, does this scepticism
lead? It leads a man to a shameful loneliness
and selfishness, so to speak, the more shameful,
because it is so good-humoured and conscienceless
and serene. Conscience ! What is conscience ?
Why accept remorse ? What is public or private
faith? Mythuses alike enveloped in enormous
tradition. If, seeing and acknowledging the lies
of the world, Arthur, as see them you can with
only too fatal a clearness, you submit to them
without any protest further than a laugh ; if,
plunged yourself in easy sensuality, you allow
the whole wretched world to pass groaning by
you unmoved ; if the fight for the truth is taking
place, and all men of honour are on the ground
armed on the one side or the other, and you alone
are to lie on your balcony and smoke your pipe
out of the noise and the danger, — you had better
have died, or never have been at all, than such a
sensual coward."
Thackeray goes on to tell us how Arthur would
answer these reflections. The tirade ends by Pen
observing to George Warrington, " And so, George,
if ever you hear of my marrying, depend upon it.
II.] ^iV OBDEB ABOVE NATUBE. 71
it won't be a romantic attacliment on my side."
And Warrington replies, " Oh, Pen, you scoundrel,
I know what you mean. This is the meaning of
your scepticism, your quietism, your atheism. My
poor fellow, you are going to sell yourself, and
Heaven help you ! You are going to make a
bargain which will degrade you and make you
miserable for life." Yes, that was really the ex-
planation. Pen had made up his mind to marry
for wealth and position a woman to whom he bore
no affection. And this treason to his higher
nature, this disloyalty to the monitor within, this
willing captivity to the world of sense, had obscured
his whole moral being; and all his mind was
clouded with a doubt.
Again, Thackeray felt in his inmost soul that
human life is inadequate to satisfy human aspira-
tions ; that at the bottom of everything, in the
phenomenal order, is that " inexorable ennui " of
which Bossuet speaks. Is there no way from
the phenomenal into the noumenal ? from that
which seems to that which is ? Kant judged that
the realization of the highest good which the
ethical faculty prescribes, implies an order above
nature. There 7nust be, he argues, a life beyond
the phenomenal where the triumph of the moral
law will be assured, where its rewards and penalties
shall be adequately realized; there rnust be a
Supreme Moral Governor who will bring about
that triumph. It appears to me that some such
72 TIIACKEBAY. [lect. ii.
cGiiviction as this was to Thackeray an anchor of
the soul — sure and steadfast. It breathes through-
out his writings. I find it most shortly and simply
stated in one of his letters. " I don't know about
the unseen world. The use of this world is the
right thing, I am sure . . . ' waiting for the com-
pletion of my senses and the fulfilment of His
intention towards me, afterwards, when this scene
closes over me." The thought expressed in this
artless language underlies, I think, many passages
ia his books.
Thackeray, after all, was a doubter, then, does
any one object ? Well, there is a fruitful doubt,
as there is a fruitful grief. Of Thackeray we
may surely say —
" Perplexed in faith, but pure in deeds,
He slowly beat his music out :
There lives more faith in honest doubt,
Believe me, than in half the creeds."
Or take the words of the great humourist regarding
whom I shall speak next week —
" By desiring what is perfectly good, even when
we don't quite know what it is, and cannot do
what we would, we are part of the Divine Power
against evil, widening the skirts of light, and
making the struggle with darkness narrower."
That, I think, correctly expresses the highest
aspect of Thackeray's work.
LECTUEE III.
THE HUMOUEIST AS POET.
GEORGE ELIOT.
LECTURE III.
THE HUMOURIST AS POET.
GEOBGE ELIOT.
Sir Toby Belch, in Tivelfth Night, inquires, " Do
not our lives consist of the four elements ? "
" 'Faith, so they say," replies Sir Andrew Ague-
cheek, " but I think it rather consists of eating
and drinking." These words have come down to
us from the sixteenth century, or it may be the
seventeenth : I believe the date of Tivelfth Night
is a vexed question. But I suppose they hold
good of the nineteenth. At all events, a poet of
our own age, and no mean poet, has given us a
picture of every-day existence not very different
from that sketched by Sir Andrew —
" What is tlie course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth ?
Most men eddy about
Here and there — eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurled in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
]Nrothing ; and then they die —
Perish ! and no one asks
Who or what they have been ;
76 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
More than he asks what waves
In the moonlit solitude wild
Of the midmost ocean have swelled,
Foamed for a moment, and gone."
Is not this witness true? Deeply corporealized,
imprisoned by the senses, do we not resemble
those unhappy men of whom Plato tells us in his
famous apologue ? There they sit, and have sat
since childhood, those miserable captives, in their
underground cavernous prison, with no opening-
save one above towards the light, fast bound in
misery and iron, not able so much as to turn their
heads, and so seeing nothing but what is straight
before them. At a distance above and behind
them, a bright fire burns, and between the fire and
the prisoners there is a raised way with a low wall
built along it, like the screen which the marionette
players in ancient Greece were wont to put up in
front of their audiences, and above which they
displayed their puppets. Behind this wall walk a
number of persons bearing vessels and images of
wood and stone and various other materials, talk-
ing as they go. And the captives, sitting without
the power of turning their heads, see their own
shadows — which is all they see of themselves and
each other — and the shadows cast by these objects
upon the part of the cavern facing them, and hear
the voices thence reverberated, for there is an echo
in their prison-house. And they refer these voices,
not to the unseen passers-by, of whom they have
no knowledge, but to the passing shadows, which
III.] THE VEIL OF MATA. 77
they take for realities. Strange and weird concep-
tion ! But how true an image of human life till
we are enfranchised from the chains of sense.
''Passing shadows." Are not these the things
which all of us for some period of our lives, some
of us for our whole lives, take for realities ? There
is a profound remark of Emerson, '' All that seems
most real about us is but the thinnest substance
of a shadow, until the heart be touched." It is
that touch which sets us free, lifting for us, as the
authors of the Upanishads would say, the veil of
Maya, ridding us of illusions about the make and
matter of the phenomenal world, revealing to us,
as the only true facts essential and eternal, ideas
of which phenomena are the accidental and tran-
sitory reflections.
" Letting us pent-up creatures througli
Into eternity, our due."
Now this touch of the heart may come to us
in several ways. The most universal instrument
of it is religion. I use the word in its most
general sense. I mean by it not the form of
faith which may commend itself to you or to me,
but the transcendental mode of the soul which
underlies all forms of faith ; the heart religion
of John Wesley, the Everlasting Yea of Carlyle.
I need not dwell on what is so familiar. But
this touch of the heart may come to us through
external nature. There, too, is a path for those
who can find it, into the transcendental. I
78 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
remember vividly — and many here, doubtless, have
similar experiences — how in an autumn afternoon
of singular loveliness, which seems to rise before
me across the gulf of years, Nature was first re-
vealed to me as a living reality, a spirit meeting
with my spirit, " a Presence which is not to be put
by." I can now see those magnificent woods
through which I wandered with my eyes opened and
my ears unstopped, so to speak, for the first time,
finding " tongues in the trees, books in the running
brooks ; " hearing in the moaning of the winds the
elegy of the dying year, nay, the burial hymn of
the world; reading for the first time the high
moralities and stern, the " thoughts that do often
lie too deep for tears," inscribed on the falling
foliage and the fading flowers. Art, again, has
the same high revelatory function. I do not
know who has brought out this truth better than
Schopenhauer, one of the finest and subtlest spirits
of our age, however much his system as a whole
may repel us. The function of art, this profound
and bitter thinker considers, is the deliverance of
man from the chain of vulgar illusions binding us
to the phenomenal world, by presenting the things
that have veritable being, the permanent, essential
forms immutable and ever true. Art is really one,
however the artist manifest his gift. There are
diversities of operation, but the same spirit. The
true artist is a seer. He is the man whose eyes
are opened. His mission, whether he use painting
III.] THE FUNCTION OF ART. 79
or sculpture, '' the concord of sweet sounds," or
ordered words, is to body forth the forms of things
unknown which have been revealed to him. Hence
art, like nature, is essentially religious, in the
highest signification of the word. A man's eyes
must be holden that they see not, if he can regard
himself as the measure of all things, when standing
by the sea, or on the mountains, or under a starlit
sky : or when gazing at Eaphael's Transfiguration,
or looking around him in the cathedral of Chartres,
or reading the Divine Comedy^ or Hamlet, or
Faust.
But the form of art which appeals most widely —
the highest form Aristotle considers it, and I think
rightly — is, no doubt, the poetic. And perhaps
the function of poetry is now of ever-growing im-
portance. Hitherto poetry has been largely the
handmaid of the theologies of the world. Thus in
ancient Hellas the tragedians were the exponents
of the theological traditions of their country. In
their plays we have those traditions dramatized
and clothed in poetic forms of consummate
and imperishable beauty. Dante is the poetic
theologian of mediaeval Catholicism. Milton is
the poetic theologian of modern Puritanism. In
this age, as a matter of fact, and apart from all
theories, theologies have largely lost their hold
upon the general mind in many countries. Thus,
to give one example, even in Scotland — "broad
Scotland, Bible-loving Scotland," as it used to be
80 GEORGE ELIOT. [lect.
called — the cultured classes, who in the long run
lead the rest, after passing through a stage of
literature and dogma, appear to have reached a
stage of literature without dogma. Now, to many
judicious observers it seems that in these changed
conditions of men's spiritual and intellectual life,
poetry will occupy some of the ground lost by
dogmatic religious teaching. And so Professor
Tyndall, in his Fragments of Science, writes, " I
think the poet will have a great part to play in
the future of the world. ... To him it is given
for a long time to fill the shores which the reces-
sion of the theologic tide has left bare." The
professor's metaphor is a little puzzling. But his
meaning clearly is that we shall have to look to
poetry, mainly, for arousing and disciplining the
nobler emotions ; for lifting us above the senses ;
for idealizing life ; for preserving us from that
spiritual dryness which, as I remarked in my First
Lecture, is a special danger of the age.
It is, perhaps, open to question whether, if we
survey the world at large, the theologic tide which
Professor Tyndall saw ebbing, as he thought for
good and all, has not begun to fiiow again, and
that with a certain strength, even, since the time
he thus wrote. But without discussing that
matter, we may agree, I think, with the Professor,
that the poet will have a great part to play in the
future of the world. Indeed, I should say that
he plays a great part in the present. I add that
HI.] TEE ESSENCE OF POETRY. 81
in these days — so it seems to me — the most widely
influential poets are those who do not employ
metrical forms. We must remember that the
essential conditions of true imaginative literature,
whether it uses those forms or not, are the same.
Verse, no doubt, was originally intended to be
sung. The Myjviv detSe, Oea of Homer, the " Arma
virumque cano " of Virgil, witness to a truth of
fact. Rhythm and rhyme were employed originally
as aids to the memory, as augmentations of tune-
fulness. But, as Aristotle tells us in the Poetics,
the essence of true poetry is not metrical form.
That is but an accident. No doubt music is an
essential element of poetry. But there is a
deeper music than that of metre or rhyme, which
are, in Aristotle's phrase, mere T^Suar/xara, literally,
seasonings ; added charms, we may say. There
is the music of winged words, of picturesque
phrases, of stately sentences, which we find as
much in prose of a certain order, as in verse. You
remember the lines of Wordsworth —
" many are the poets that are sown
By Nature : men adorned with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine :
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse."
We may have the finest poetry without poetic
metres. Consider, for example, the Psalms of
David, as we read them, whether in the Roman
Breviary or in the Anglican Prayer -hook, the Booh
of Joh, whether in St. Jerome's Latin or in the
G
82 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
English of King James's translators, or innumer-
able passages in the great prose writers, whether
of our own or any other nation.
It is worth while to enlarge a little upon this.
Truth has two modes of expression ; the language
of fact, and the language of fancy ; the tongue of
the phenomenal, and the tongue of the ideal.
The common antithesis between poetry and prose
is misleading. Shelley calls it " a vulgar error."
There is much so-called prose which is excellent
unmetrical poetry. There is much so-called poetry
which is villainous prose in metre. It is a dictum
of Sir Philip Sidney, " One may be a poet without
versing, and a versifier without poetry." The
true antithesis is between prose and verse. A
canon of my own in judging verse is that no man
has a right to put into metre what he can as well
say out of metre. To which I may add, as a
corollary, that a fortiori he has no right to put
into metre what he can better say out of metre.
Now I think that in the present day the vast
majority of our poets should be content to be
unmetrical. It appears to me that for a long
time to come, the novelist, according to his
inspiration and in proportion to his power, is
likely to be the most popular, the most successful
preacher of ideal truth, the most effectual inter-
preter of the supersensuous interests of humanity.
Wordsworth, writing in the year 1815, observes,
"Few persons will deny that of two descriptions
iii.j PBOSE AND VEHSE. 83
either of passions, manners, or characters, equally
well executed, the one in prose, the other in verse,
the verse will be read a hundred times where the
prose is read once." Well, we have changed all
that now. Since these words were written the
schoolmaster has been abroad and — I will not say
education, a word generally misused, but — the art
of reading has been widely diffased. For one
reader in Wordsworth's days, there are a thousand
readers, at least, in ours. And literature has
become democratized. Now to appreciate verse
demands much more culture than to appreciate
prose. An accurate taste in metrical composition
is certainly an acquired faculty. Nay, more,
sensibility to harmony of numbers is by no means
a very common endowment, as is sufficiently
proved by the fact that it is rare to meet with
any one who can read verse decently. Most
people read it with hardly any regard to modula-
tion, cadence, rhythm, just as if it were prose.
In these days we may safely reverse Wordsworth's
dictum and say that of two descriptions either
of passions, manners, or characters, equally well
executed, the one in prose, the other in verse,
the prose will be read a hundred times where the
verse is read once.
And this leads me to the special work of
George Eliot as a humourist. We must certainly
84 GEORGE ELIOT. [lect.
consider her a Immourist in tlie fullest sense of tlie
word, as I defined it in my First Lecture ; an artist
who playfully gives us his intuition of the world
and human life. It is a grave playfulness, remind-
ing me a good deal of Socrates, not the Socrates
of the Platonic Dialogues, but the Socrates of the
MemorahiUa. I shall not, however, analyze her
humour and compare it with the playfulness of
other humourists ; that, as I said in my First
Lecture, would be beside my present purpose. I
find in her the type of The Humourist as Poet.
For her metrical compositions, with just one
exception, I care little. They leave me cold. Mr.
John Morley has happily characterized them '' as
majestic in intention and sonorous in execution."
Even the lines so hugely admired about
" tlie clioir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence "
seem to me — may I say it ? — thin in conception,
and turgid in expression. I should call her a prose
poet who tried to write verse and achieved a very
moderate measure of success. There are, indeed,
a few stanzas of hers in which she does seem to
me to have reached a very high standard of
excellence. You remember how in Middlemarch,
on one fine Sunday morning, Will Ladislaw is
walking to Lowick church, attracted thither by
a desire, not to hear the eloquence of Mr.
Casaubon, but to look upon the face of Dorothea.
in.] NOT UNWORTHY OF GOETHE. 85
Doubts arise in his mind whether Dorothea will
like it — he is sure Mr. Casaubon won't, but that
gives an additional zest to the expedition. He
silences objections, however, by the force of un-
reason, and proceeds on his way across Halsell
Common, revolving in his mind all sorts of tender
and tremulous memories, and sweet inarticulate
aspirations, and singing to himself as he goes
these verses of his own —
" me, me, what frugal cheer
My love doth feed upon !
A touch, a ray, that is not here,
A shadow that is gone :
" A dream of breath that might be near,
An inly-echoed tone ;
The thought that one may think me dear,
The place where one was known.
" The tremor of a banished fear.
An ill that was not done —
O me, me, what frugal cheer
My love doth feed upon ! "
Now I call those exquisite lines, instinct with a
subtle charm, a tender grace, of which I find small
trace in The Spanish Gypsy, in Juhal, in A College
Breahfast Table. Nay, I will say a bold thing.
They seem to me not unworthy of Goethe himself,
between whose genius and George Eliot's there
is, indeed, a certain affinity.
But this little poem stands by itself in George
Eliot's works. It is to her prose and not to her
verse that we must turn, if we would see her make
86 GEORGE ELIOT. [lect.
proof of her gift as a true poet. Wordsworth — I
have not quite done with him yet — has enume-
rated '^ six powers requisite for the production of
poetry." They are these —
'* Eirst, those of Observation and Description,
i.e. the ability to observe with accuracy things
as they are in themselves, and with fidelity
to describe them, unmodified by any passion or
feeling existing in the mind of the describer.
Secondly, Sensibility, which, the more exquisite
it is, the wider will be the range of a poet's
perceptions, and the more will he be incited to
observe objects, both as they exist in themselves,
and as reacted upon by his own mind. Thirdly,
Reflection, which makes the poet acquainted with
the value of actions, images, thoughts, and feel-
ings ; and assists the sensibility in perceiving
theii' connection with each other. Fourthly,
Imagination and Fancy, to modify, to create,
and to associate. Fifthly, Invention, by which
characters are composed out of materials supplied
by observation. And lastly, Judgment, to decide
how and where, and in what degree, each of these
faculties ought to be exerted so that the less shall
not be sacrificed to the greater, nor the greater,
slighting the less, arrogate to its own injury
more than its due."
Wordsworth adds, " The materials of poetry, by
these powers collected and produced, are cast, by
means of various moulds, into divers forms." One
of these forms is what he calls The Narrative.
And he tells us, " The distinguishing mark [of it]
m.] POETIC POWERS. 87
is that the narrator, however liberally his speaking
agent be introduced, is himself the source from
which everything primarily flows." Now it appears
to me that George Eliot possesses all these powers
in ample measure. If we compare her with the
other two great humourists who have been the
subjects of the preceding Lectures, we shall see
that she had their faculties of Observation and
Description, and more ; while she had the faculty
Wordsworth calls Sensibility in a degree to which
neither of them at all nearly approached. She
has, indeed, involuntarily suggested a comparison
in this respect between herself and Dickens by
certain words of her own. " Dickens," she wrote,
" is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the
external traits of our town population, and if he
could give us their psychological character, their
conception of life and their emotions, with the
same truth as their manners, his books would be
the greatest contribution art has ever made to
the awakening of the social sympathies." Now
George Eliot was singularly endowed with this
psychological power in which, as she justly
observes, Dickens was lacking. She could render
external truth as well as he; but her characters
are drawn from within, not, like his, from without.
Her insight is deeper, much deeper, even than
Thackeray's, while she had all his vividness of
observation, his power of delineation, in her own
domain, which was not his domain. Thackeray's
88 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
psychology fell very short of hers. He quite
realized that interior, secret life which each man
leads in isolation from his fellows. But George
Eliot penetrated far more deeply into it. She had
a peculiar gift of her own — unique among English
writers of romantic fiction — of drawing the indi-
vidual character of a living soul, of representing it
in its complete relations. And that is a note of
high poetic genius. How earnestly she exercised
the power of Eeflection — the next on Wordsworth's
list of poetic gifts — is indicated in a letter of hers
to Mr. Frederic Harrison. She speaks there of
herself as engaged in the severe effort to make
certain ideas thoroughly incarnate, as if they had
been revealed to her first in the flesh and blood,
and not in the spirit. Imagination and Fancy are
written on every one of her pages. With what
delicacy and tenderness and power does she
handle the most subtle movements of the human
affections ! And her method, as she tells us, was
to begin with minds, thoughts, and passions, and
then invent the story for their sakes and fit it to
them. Lastly, her Judgment is pre-eminently
seen in that aesthetic completeness which she
attains, at all events in her earlier and better
works. It was hers with truth
" to correspond, and sink,
Or rise, as venerable Nature leads."
Hence the moral unity which marks her com-
positions.
iir.j ESSENTIALLY A POET. 89
I may here notice that Eubens was her favourite
painter, giving her, as she says, "more pleasm^e
than any other painter, whether right or wrong."
"His are such real men and women," she adds,
" moved by passions, not mincing, and grimacing,
and posing in mere imitation of passions." I do
not know, however, that I personally should
describe George Eliot's inspiration as reminding
me of Eubens. There is something in her genius
which rather recalls to me the great masters of
the Spanish school of painting. Her vivid and
strongly drawn characters seem to speak of their
energetic art.
So much may suffice to indicate why it is that
I regard George Eliot as essentially a poet, ex-
pressing for us — this, according to Aristotle, is the
function of the true poet — the universal element
in human life. And it is noticeable in how many
different orders of poetry she has excelled. Mr.
GilfiVs Love Story ^ Janet's Bepentance, Silas Mar-
ner — are there anywhere more exquisite idylls!
Where is there more delicious pastoral than in
Adam Bedef Through it there breathes a fresh-
ness as of spring itself. One thinks of the verse
of Shakespeare —
" 0, it came o'er my ear like the sweet South
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour."
Where is there more touching elegiac than in the
story of Maggie Tulliver ? Middlemarch has been
90 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
called, I forget by whom, ''a great prose epic;"
and the description is not amiss. It is true that
in her latter years a sort of scientific pedantry
somewhat marred George Eliot's poetic gift. Her
biological studies thwarted the true bent of her
genius. Art and physical science are two essen-
tially different ways of interpreting nature and
man. The scientific novel is an abortion, a
monstrosity. But even in Daniel Deronda, in spite
of much that one could wish away, there is the
old inimitable charm of psychology at once exact
and delicate, of penetrative pathos, of exquisite
sensibility, like Goethe's, to every touch of the
world of form, colour, and passion.
And now let us go on to inquire what is the
ethos of George Eliot's prose poetry. I remember
to have seen her described — and that by a critic
of note — as "the most influential Positivist writer
of her age : " and, by another, as " the first great
godless writer of fiction that has appeared in
England." By " godless," this last-cited authority
means — as he explains — "without God, not against
Him." George Eliot's writings, he adds, " do not
deny, but they silently and skilfully ignore Him."
And, by way of example of this, he bids us con-
sider Mr. Tryan and Savonarola. George Eliot,
he insists, "contrives to exhibit all she wishes us
to admire in Mr. Tryan, as resting on a basis with
which his religious beliefs have nothing at all to
ui.] POSITIVISM. 91
do; " while "Savonarola is the spokesman of Hu-
manity made divine, not of Divinity made human."
The writer from whom I am quoting regards
George Eliot's "artistic powers" as "a mere
auxiliary to her philosophic powers," and con-
siders that " she has the strongest claim to be
judged by her philosophy" — her Positivist phi-
losophy. Now all this seems to me untenable.
No doubt George Ehot was — in a sense — a Posi-
tivist. I say, "in a sense," because the word is,
in truth, very indefinite. It is quite clear that
she was not a Positivist in the full meaning of
the word, which is, I take it, a professed disciple
of Comte. Mr. Cross tells us, in her Life, " Her
appreciation of Comte was thoroughly selective.
Part of his teachings were accepted, and others
rejected. It was a limited adherence." And so,
writing to Miss Jane Hennell in 1861, she ex-
pressed her agreement with her correspondent in
thinking Positivism " one-sided." M. Littre's
account of the Positivist philosophy is as follows :
" The Positivist philosophy is the totality of
human knowledge {V ensemble du savon humain).
But how do we define human knowledge ? We
define it as the study of the forces which belong
to matter and of the conditions or laws which
govern those forces." Is that a correct account
of George Eliot's philosophy? Would she have
allowed that our knowledge is bounded by " the
forces which belong to matter and the conditions
92 GEORGE ELIOT. [lect.
or laws which govern those forces ? " I doubt
it very much.
Certain it is, indeed, that, early in life, George
Eliot was led to reject what has been called
" the Christian mythology," and to accept the
rationalized account of the Evangelical history
given by Strauss, whose best-known work she
translated. Afterwards, she fell a great deal
under the influence of Mr. Herbert Spencer, of
whose ethical doctrines traces may be found,
here and there, in her writings ; and especially in
her Essays of Tlieoplirastus SucJi. I suppose her
most distinctively Positivist work — and it is her
least successful — is The Sjjaitlsh Gypseij. But, in
whatever sense, and with whatever limitations we
are to find her a Positivist, assuredly she was not
"an influential Positivist writer." The writings
in which she has directly expounded her philo-
sophy — such as it was — exercised little influence.
And her prose poems — her novels — certainly
were not a vehicle for Positivist propagandism.
True it is that she is always a thinker. All
veritable art rests on thought. But "the essence
of thinking is that the right ideas occur at the
right time." And, in the artist, the logical
understanding holds a subordinate position. Its
aids and artifices merely assist and facilitate
in the execution of his creative purpose. " To
be purely esthetic, to paint, not to prove," "to
glory in what is actually great and beautiful," is
III.] THE THEISTIC IDEA. 93
George Eliot's account of her work. And of all
beauty, the beauty of holiness is the most soul
subduing. The halo of the saints — " divine artists
in the moral order " — is a reflection of " the
brightness increate " of ''the Altogether Lovely."
In 1857 Georofe Eliot writes to a friend that she
feels " a greater disinclination for theories and
arguments, in the presence of all this mystery
and beauty and pain and ugliness that flood one
with conflicting emotions."
It is, as I hold — in opposition to the critic I
quoted just now — precisely by her powers of
rendering those emotions, and not by her
philosophic powers, that George Eliot has the
strongest claims to be judged. And of those
emotions the most masterful and the most
universal are the religious. These, from first to
last, were the chords on which George Eliot struck
most mightily. Is it true that in dealing with
these, George Eliot ignores the Supreme Object
round which they centre ? If you recall certain
pages of Janefs Repeyitance, of Adam Bede, of
Romola — pages which I do not doubt are in the
recollection of every one here — you will find a
suf&cient answer to the question. To George
Eliot, the artist — whatever she may have held
as a philosopher — the great Theistic idea was
the source of her deepest and most powerful in-
spiration. The statement that she " contrives
to exhibit all she wishes us to admire in
94 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
Mr. Tryan, as resting upon a basis with which his
religious beliefs have nothing whatever to do," is
one of the strangest which I have ever read.
You remember Mr. Tryan's simple story. A
wrong done in early manhood, to a young girl,
becomes to him — as it has become to so many
others — a source of lifelong remorse. The last
stage on her downward road is soon reached ; and
it is suicide. A great change is wrought in him.
He becomes a clergyman of the Evangelical
school — then in the freshness of its fervour — and
devotes himself with apostolic zeal to his sacred
calling. " I could not rescue Lucy ; but by God's
blessing I might rescue other weak and falling
souls; and that was why I entered the Church."
He rescues Janet Dempster, you will remember ;
rescues her from self-despair : strengthens her
with divine hopes : and makes the life she was
to lead, for long years after he rested from his
labours, " a solemn service of gratitude and
patient effort." "The man who has left such a
memorial behind him " — these are the words with
which George Eliot ends the story — "must have
been one whose heart beat with true compassion
and whose lips were moved by fervent faith."
"Fervent faith." Yes. It is precisely in Mr.
Tryan's " religious belief" that George Eliot shows
us the source of what she wishes us to admire
in him. Then, again, Savonarola, we are told,
is " the spokesman of Humanity made divine, not
III.] ^^ INDIRECT FELLOWSHIP." 95
of Divinity made human." Well, but " humanity
made divine " is just as much a part of the
Christian idea as ''Divinity made human." I do
not say that George Eliot's Savonarola is precisely
the Savonarola of history. But I do say that
the words George Eliot puts into Savonarola's
mouth, " The higher life begins for us, when we
renounce our own will to bow before a Divine
law," express the very essence of Christianity as
its greatest saints have ever conceived of it.
It appears to me, then, that Mr. Lewes was
well warranted when, in sending George Eliot's
first novel to Blackwood, he wrote, " Her tone
throughout is sympathetic with religious beliefs,"
and "not at all antagonistic" to them. Black-
wood thought the new author a clergyman, and
most of the critics were of the same opinion. It
is worth while to recall here a sentence in a letter
of George Eliot's to Blackwood, written at the
same date : " My irony, so far as I understand
myself, is not directed against opinions — against
any class of religious views — but against the vices
and weaknesses that belong to human nature in
any sort of clothing." Many years afterwards,
writing to Mrs. Beecher Stowe, she speaks of
"the indirect fellowship" one may have with
"religious opinions not one's own." And in a
letter of a somewhat earlier date she says, " I
feel no regret that any one should turn to [the
forms and ceremonies of religion] for comfort, if
96 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
they cart find comfort in them. I enjoy them
sympathetically myself." Mr. Buckle's "millen-
nial prospect " — the words are her own — " when
superstition will vanish and statistics will reign
for ever and ever," did not attract her in the
least. "The Bible," Mr. Cross tells us, "was a
very precious and sacred book to her, not only
from early associations, but also from the profound
conviction of its importance in the religious life
of men." And, next to the Bible, she treasured
most Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ.
There can be no doubt of her deep conviction —
a conviction, I think, somewhere expressed by
Eduard von Hartmann — that only the trans-
cendental ideas of Christianity could have com-
pleted that deepening of the heart which is one
of the most precious possessions of modern
civilization. And she would do nothing to weaken
the hold of those ideas on the popular mind ; no,
nor upon the mind of any man or woman. She
expresses herself strongly, I might say vehemently,
in this sense, in a letter to Madam Bodichon,
written in 1862. "Please don't ask me, again,
not to rob a man of his religious belief, as if you
thought my mind tended to such robbery. I
have too profound a conviction of the efficacy
that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual
blight that comes with no faith, to have any
negative propagandism in me. In fact, I have
very little sympathy with freethinkers as a class,
III.] THE INSPIBATION OF GENIUS. 97
and have lost all interest in mere antagonism to
religious doctrines." The truth is that, from first
to last, George Eliot's was a singularly religious
mind, although all existing religious symbols
seemed to her insufficient. You remember Kenan's
account of himself: '' Au fond je sens que ma vie
est gouvernee par une foi que je n'ai plus." I
think that is the true account of George Eliot.
But, further, I observed just now that in the
artist the logical understanding does not hold the
first place ; that its aids and artifices are auxihary.
I add, reverting to a thought on which I touched
half an hour ago, that true art is of the nature of
inspiration. Eduard von Hartmann seems to me
to speak the exact truth when he tells us, in his
Philosophy of the TJnconscious, " All eminent artists
owe their productions predominantly to the inspira-
tion of their genius, and not to the work of their
consciousness, be they, in all other concerns of
life, as clear-headed as possible." And again, "A
genuine work of art is incommensurable with any
rationalistic standard." It is no new doctrine,
indeed. The ancients regarded a kind of possession
as the distinctive note of the artist. This is " the
divine madness" of which Plato speaks in the
Phaedi'us ; the "furor poeticus " of Cicero. It is
the ''fine frenzy" that Shakespeare attributes to
the poet. I need not enlarge on what is so familiar,
but I should like to read to you a few profound
words of that profound thinker Schelling, which
H
98 GEOEGE ELIOT. [lect.
are very pertinent in this connection. " Just as
the man of destiny does not execute what he wills
or intends, hut what he is obliged to execute,
through an incomprehensible fate, under whose
influence he stands, so the artist, however full of
design he is, yet, in respect of that which is the
properly objective in his production, seems to stand
under the influence of a power which separates
him from all other men, and compels him to
declare or represent things which he himself does
not completely see through, and whose import is
infinite." Now assured^ this was the case with
G-eorge Eliot. Indeed, we have her own express
testimony that it was. " She told me," Mr. Cross
relates, " that in all her best work there was a
' not herself ' which took possession of her, and
that she felt her own personality to be merely the
instrument through which this spirit, as it were,
was acting." That is quite sufficient to explain —
if explanation be wanted — how we may reconcile
the negative conclusions which she held, intellec-
tually, and the vivid realization of Theistic faith,
which is so marked a characteristic of her novels.
The artist speaks not of himself. We may further
say that in this union of Positivism and Mysticism,
George EHot is typical of her age. How many
are there who have experienced, who constantly
experience, the truth of those verses of Tennyson
in which he tells us how the Atheism of the
understanding is annihilated by the heart, how we
III.] THE UNDERSTANDING AND TEE HEABT. 99
feel — we cannot help ourselves — the Absolute and
Eternal, though we may not find Him out.
" That which we dare invoke to bless ;
Our dearest faith ; our ghastliest doubt :
He, They, One, All ; within, without ;
The Power in darkness whom we guess.
"I found Him not in world or sun,
Or eagle's wing, or insect's eye ;
Nor thro' the questions men may try,
The petty cobwebs we have spun.
" If e'er when faith had fallen asleep,
I heard a voice ' believe no more,'
And heard an ever-breaking shore.
That tumbled in the Godless deep ;
"A warmth within the heart would melt
The freezing reason's colder part.
And like a man in wrath the heart.
Stood up and answered, ' I have felt.' "
It is that touch, from beyond the veil of phe-
nomena, felt by the heart — I spoke of it in begin-
ning this Lecture — which lets us into eternity
and is the surest evidence of things not seen.
So much may suffice to vindicate George Eliot
against what seems to me a grave misconception.
And now what shall we say is the ethos of her
prose poetry? To me it seems to be essentially
that of the tragedians of ancient Hellas: " those
wise old spirits," we may call them, with Jeremy
Taylor, "who preserved natural reason and religion
in the midst of heathen darkness." "My func-
tion," she herself said, " is that of the aesthetic, not
100 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
the doctrinal teacher — the rousing of the nobler
emotions." Now that was precisely the function
of ^Eschylus, of Sophocles, of Euripides. The
work of those great masters was to bring out the
deep truths which lived in the antique legends :
" Presenting Thebes and Pelops' line,
And the talc of Troy divine : "
to reset them in the forms furnished by creative
genius : to present the stern facts of human life
transfigured and idealized ; and thus, as Aristotle
puts it, to cleanse the soul by pity and terror.
George Eliot treats similarly incidents, emotions,
passions of ordinary life. Her work was of the
same order as that of those wise old spirits. But
she has most in common with Euripides.
" Euripides the human — with his droppings of warm tears,
And his touchings of things common till they seem to touch
the spheres."
In mastery of the emotions, in truthfulness to life,
in deep religiousness of nature, Euripides and
George Eliot strikingly resemble one another.
George Eliot's themes are the pity and pathos,
the terror and tenderness of everyday existence.
Her pages breathe " the still sad music of
humanity." From them
" Seems sui'ging the Virgilian cry,
The sense of tears in mortal things."
Her work is essentially tragedy. She knew well
that sadness is a great sacrament, a fount of
in.] SEVEBE LESSONS. 101
purification, a dipping of the soul in lustral waters.
She knew, too, that happiness is like the light :
that it needs the dark background of chaos and
the inane for its gorgeous colouring. The spirit
in which George Eliot's work is done is in itself
a protest against evil. And in exhibiting to us
the play of the great elemental passions of
humanity, always full of strife and suffering, she
suggests to us severe lessons, which we may
formulate for ourselves.
But, further, the deep underlying thought of
Greek tragedy — and this is especially true of
^schylus — is the absolute and indefeasible claim
of the divine law upon our obedience, and the in-
exorableness of its penal sanctions. That, too, is
the deep underlying thought of George Eliot.
What account she gave to herself of that law, I do
not know, nor do I greatly care. But the feeling
that in the moral world, as in the physical,
" nothing is that errs from law," law fenced about,
as all law is, by punishments — for a law that may
be broken with impunity is no law at all — that is
the august verity ever present to the mind of
George Eliot. You remember the verses of
Goethe —
" Nach ewigen, ehrnen,
Grossen Gesetzen,
Miissen wir alle
Unseres Daseyns
Kreise vollenden."
Yes: "miissen wir alle." Those laws of life we
102 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
must obey, or iucur the retribution which by the
nature of things attends their violation.
Lord Acton has well observed, " From the bare
diagram of Brother Jacob, to the profound and
finished picture of Middlemarch, retribution is the
constant theme and motive of George Eliot's art."
No Buddhist with his doctrine of Karma, could
have more vividly apprehended, more firmly
grasped, more efi"ectively inculcated, the stern
truth that we cannot escape from the consequences
of our past selves ; that as we read in the Pali
Dhammapada " evil deeds must bear evil fruits ; "
there is no help for it : that " if a man speaks or
acts with an evil thought, pain follows him, as the
wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the
carriage ; " that punishment is, in Hegel's striking
phrase, the other half of crime, naturally and
inevitably following it : a debt contracted by it
which must be paid off. Such was George Eliot's
conception of the inexorableness of the moral law
and of its tremendous sanctions. She felt in her
inmost being the great verity formulated by Kant
— although, I think, she was not versed in his
ethical philosophy — that there is something in the
idea of our Practical Eeason which accompanies
the transgression of a moral law, namely, the idea
of punishment due to the transgression. And
this august verity informs all her novels, and
renders them of singular value in an age of sickly
sentimentalism, like our own.
III.] MBS. POYSERS DAIBT. 103
Let us glance — it is all we have time to do — at
two of Greorge Eliot's works in which this truth
is at the very centre of the fahle. And first con-
sider Adam Bede, which I have always regarded
as the high-water mark of her genius. You
remember that inimitable picture of Hetty as we
see her for the first time in Mrs. Peyser's dairy.
I suppose I have read it a hundred times. I intend
now to read it again for the hundred and first. It
is " a joy for ever," so beautiful is it. Some fresh
charm comes out upon every fresh perusal.
" The dairy was certainly worth looking at : it
was a scene to sicken for with a sort of calenture
in hot and dusty streets — such coolness, such
fresh fragrance of new-pressed cheese, of firm
butter, of wooden vessels perpetually bathed in
pure water; such soft colouring of red earthenware
and creamy surfaces, brown wood and polished
tin, grey limestone and rich orange-red rust on
the iron weights and hooks and hinges. But one
gets only a confused notion of these details when
they surround a distractingly pretty girl of seven-
teen standing on little pattens and rounding her
dimpled arm to lift a pound of butter out of the
scale.
"Hetty blushed a deep rose-colour when Captain
Donnithorne entered the dair}^ and spoke to her ;
but it was not at all a distressed blush, for it was
in wreathed with smiles and dimples, and with
sparkles from under long curled dark eye-lashes ;
and while her aunt was discoursing to him about
the limited amount of milk that was to be spared
104 GEORGE ELIOT. [lect.
for butter and cheese so long as the calves were
not weaned, and a large quantity but inferior
quality of milk yielded by the shorthorn, which
had been bought on experiment, together with
other matters which must be interesting to a
young gentleman who would one day be a land-
lord, Hetty tossed and patted her pound of butter
with quite a self-possessed, coquettish air, slily
conscious that no turn of her head was lost.
''There are various orders of beauty, causing men
to make fools of themselves in various styles, from
the desperate to the sheepish ; but there is one
order of beauty which seems made to turn the
heads, not only of men, but of all intelligent
mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like
that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making
gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or
babies just beginning to toddle, and to engage in
conscious mischief — a beauty with which you can
never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush
for inability to comprehend the state of mind into
which it throws you. Hetty Sorrel's was that
sort of beauty. Her aunt, Mrs. Poyser, who
professed to despise all personal attractions, and
intended to be the severest of mentors, continually
gazed at Hetty's charms by the sly, fascinated in
spite of herself; and after administering such a
scolding as naturally flowed from her anxiety to
do well by her husband's niece — who had no
mother of her own to scold her, poor thing ! — she
would often confess to her husband, when they
were safe out of hearing, that she firmly believed
' the naughtier the little huzzy behaved, the
prettier she looked.'
m.] A THING OF BEAUTY. 105
''It is of little use for me to tell you that Hetty's
cheek was like a rose-petal, that dimples played
about her pouting lips^ that her large dark eyes
hid a soft roguishness under their long lashes, and
that her curly hair, though all pushed back under
her round cap while she was at work, stole back
in dark delicate rings on her forehead, and about
her white shell-like ears ; it is of little use for
me to say how lovely was the contour of her pink-
and- white neckerchief, tucked into her low plum-
coloured stuff bodice, or how the Hnen butter-
making apron, with its bib, seemed a thing to be
imitated in silk by duchesses, since it fell in such
charming lines, or how her brown stockings and
thick-soled, buckled shoes lost all that clumsiness
which they must certainly have had when empty
of her foot and ankle ; — of little use, unless you
have seen a woman who affected you as Hetty
affected her beholders, for otherwise, though you
might conjure up the image of a lovely woman,
she would not in the least resemble that distract-
ing kitten-like maiden. I might mention all the
divine charms of a bright spring day, but if you
had never in your life utterly forgotten yourself in
straining your eyes after the mounting lark, or
in wandering through the still lanes when the
fresh-opened blossoms fill them with a sacred,
silent beauty like that of fretted aisles, where
would be the use of my descriptive catalogue ?
I could never make you know what I meant by
a bright spring day. Hetty's was a spring-tide
beauty; it was the beauty of young frisking things,
round-limbed, gambolling, circumventing you by
a false air of innocence — the innocence of a young
106 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
star-browed calf, for examjjle, tliat, being inclined
for a promenade out of bounds, leads you a severe
steeplechase over hedge and ditch, and only comes
to a stand in the middle of a bog.
"And they are the prettiest attitudes and move-
ments into which a pretty girl is thrown in making
up butter — tossing movements that give a charm-
ing curve to the arm, and a sideward inclination
of the round white neck ; little patting and rolling
movements with the palm of the hand, and nice
adaptations and finishings which cannot at all be
effected without a great play of the pouting mouth
and the dark eyes. And then the butter itself
seems to communicate a fresh charm — it is so
pure, so sweet-scented ; it is turned off the mould
with such a beautiful firm surface, like marble in
a pale yellow light ! Moreover, Hetty was par-
ticularly clever at making up the butter ; it was
the one performance of hers that her aunt allowed
to pass without severe criticism ; so she handled
it with all the grace that belongs to mastery."
And now shall I turn to the end of the second
volume and read you the account of Hetty Sorel
in Stoniton jail, under sentence of death for child-
murder ? No ; I will spare you, and myself, that.
Let me rather ask you to note how through the
hundreds of pages which divide the two episodes,
the thought of retribution constantly occurs. You
remember how poor Arthur Donnithorne, in a feeble
irresolute way, so true to life, dallies with the
temptation. His friend the Eector, Irwine — what
III.] CONSEQUENCES. 107
an admii'ably drawn character ! — gives him a kind
caution : " Don't feed her vanity and fill her little
noddle with the notion that she is a great beauty,
attractive to fine gentlemen, or you will spoil her
for a poor man's wife." Arthur does not think
it possible for him to do anything mean, dastardly,
or cruel. " I am a devil of a fellow for getting
myself into a hobble," he meditates; "but I
always take care that the load shall fall on my
own shoulders." " Unhappily," adds George
Eliot, like the Chorus in a Greek play, " hobbles
sometimes obstinately refuse to inflict their worst
consequences on the prime offender, in spite of
his loudly expressed wish." Arthm- Donnithorne
meets Hetty, and then — well, what can he do to
secure himself from any more of this folly ? He
will take his old friend and tutor into his confi-
dence. He will tell Irwine. " The mere act of
telling will make the matter seem trivial; the
temptation will vanish, as the charm of fond words
vanishes when we repeat them to the indifferent."
He tries to tell Irwine, but, willing to justify him-
self — another masterly touch — he prefaces his
intended confession with the question: "You
don't think one who struggles against a tempta-
tion into which he falls at last, as bad as the man
who never struggles at all ? " And the Eector
answers, "No, certainly : I pity him in proportion
to his struggles, for they foreshadow that inward
suffering, which is the worst form of Nemesis.
108 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry
their terrible consequences quite apart from any
fluctuations that went before : consequences that
are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is
best to confine our minds to this certainty, instead
of considering what may be the elements of excuse
for us." But brought thus suddenly to the brink
of confession, Arthur starts back. And so the
story goes on. You all know it. I need not
follow it. But do you remember how sorry
Arthur is for himself? " Good God," he reflects,
" what a miserable fool he was to be brought into
such a dilemma. And yet if ever a man had
excuses he had." " Pity," observes the author, in
her character of Chorus, "that consequences are
determined, not by excuses, but by actions." And
then when he comes home, on his grandfather's
death, to take possession of the property, without
any evil feeling towards any human being, happy,
and wishing to make every one happy that comes'
within his reach, he finds awaiting him Irwine's
letter, telling him that Hetty is in prison awaiting
her trial on a charge of child-murder. " I will
not attempt," the Eector writes, "to add by one
word of reproval to the retribution that is now
falling on you." Ketribution ! Yes; at last he
grasps the idea. The lifelong consciousness of a
deed which he now sees in its true character, a
deed such as he had thought himself incapable of,
mean, dastardly, and cruel — aye, and irreparable !
III.] IBBEPARABLE WRONG. 109
" There's a sort of wrong that can never be made
up for," are the last words which we hear from
the lips of Arthur Donnithorne — words that had
heen spoken to him months before by Adam Bede,
and which had burned themselves into his memory,
ineffaceable for ever.
The same tragic truth underlies George Eliot's
last novel, or rather one of two stories which
we find in strange juxtaposition in Dariiel
Beronda, and by far the more interesting of the
two ; the story of Gwendolen Harleth. I call
Grandcourt one of the strongest characters ever
drawn by George Eliot, or indeed by any one :
one of the most strange and terrible creations
to be found in romantic fiction. And yet how
true to life ! We see the man with his pale
face, his calm and disdainful expression, his love
of tyranny, his disbelief in goodness, his in-
domitable self-possession, his iron will. I re-
member a distinguished French man of letters
once remarking to me, " In Grandcourt we have
the type of man sometimes formed by the athletic
and brutal education now in vogue in your public
schools. The spirit of combativeness which it
develops is useful against material obstacles. But
in idle and dissipated lives it issues in such men
as Grandcourt." I am far from wholly accepting
this criticism. But perhaps there may be an
element of truth in it worth pondering. This by
the way. Poor Gwendolen — how can we help
110 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect.
pitying her in spite of her woiidliness, her hard-
ness, her egoism? — sells her ''imperial moulded
form " to this man, in order to avoid the poverty
staring her in the face ; accepts him as her hus-
band with no affection for him, with a pretty clear
apprehension of what he is, and in spite of her
promise not to marry him given to a woman
whose story she knew — Lydia Glaisher. You
remember that Grandcourt had entrusted his
mother's diamonds to Mrs. Glaisher, at one time,
when he thought of marrying her. On Gwen-
dolen's wedding-day they are brought to her, a
bride of a few hours, in her boudoir, in her new
home, and with them this letter.
" These diamonds, which were once given with
ardent love to Lydia Glaisher, she passes on to
you. You have broken your word to her, that you
might possess what was hers. Perhaps you think
of being happy, as she once was, and of having
beautiful children such as hers, who will thrust
hers aside. God is too just for that. The man
you have married has a withered heart- His best
young love was mine ; you could not take that
from me when you took the rest. It is dead ; but
I am the grave in which your chance of happiness
is buried as well as mine. You had your warning.
You have chosen to injure me and my children.
He had meant to marry me. He would have
married me at last, if you had not broken your
word. You will have your punishment. I desire
it with all my soul.
III.] A DOOM OF PENANCE. Ill
" Will you give him this letter to set him against
me and ruin us more — me and mj children ? Shall
you like to stand before your husband with these
diamonds on you, and these words of mine in his
thoughts and yours ? Will he think you have any
right to complain when he has made you miserable ?
You took him with your eyes open. The willing
wrong you have done me will be your cm'se."
Gwendolen's eyes were spellbound in reading the
horrible words of the letter, over and over again,
a doom of penance. From that day " they nestled
their venomous life within her." What was her
existence as it dragged on, hour after hour, in
abject endurance of Grandcourt's dull tyranny, but
'' submission to a yoke drawn on her by an action
she was ashamed of; " " the humiliating doom of
terrified silence lest her husband should discover
with what sort of consciousness she had married
him." How she longs for a deliverance! "I
knew no way of killing him : but I did kill him in
my thoughts," she confesses afterwards. You know
the final catastrophe. They are sailing, Gwendolen
and her husband, off Genoa in a boat by them-
selves. Ah, but let her tell it.
"I remember then letting go the tiller and
saying ' God help me ! ' But then I was forced to
take it again and go on ; and the evil longings,
the evil prayers came again and blotted everything
else dim, till, in the midst of them — I don't know
how it was — he was turning the sail — there was a
112 GEORGE ELIOT. [lect.
gust — lie was struck — I know nothinf^ — I only
know that I saw my wish outside me. I saw him
sink, and my heart gave a leap as if it were going
out of me. I think I did not move. I kept my
hands tight. It was long enough for me to be
glad, and yet to think it was no use — he would
come up again. And he tuas come — farther off —
the boat had moved. It was all like lightning.
' The rope ! ' he called out in a voice — not his own
— I hear it now — and I stooped for the rope — I
felt I must — I felt sure he could swim, and he
would come back whether or not, and I dreaded
him. That was in my mind — he would come back.
But he was gone down again, and I had the rope
in my hand — no, there he was again — his face
above the water — and he cried again — and I held
my hand, and my heart said, ' Die ! ' — and he
sank ; and I felt ' It is done — I am wicked, I am
lost ! ' — and I had the rope in my hand — I don't
know what I thought — I was leaping away from
myself — I would have saved him then. I was
leaping away from my crime, and there it was —
close to me as I fell — there was the dead face —
dead, dead. It can never be altered."
" It can never be altered." No —
" Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life :
And righteous or unrighteous, being done,
Must throb in after throb, till Time himself
Be laid in stillness, and the universe
Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more."
One of the most widely read scholars, and most
m.] ENNOBLING INFLUENCE. 113
competent critics that tlie world just now possesses,
Lord Acton, has remarked, " There are few works
in literature whose influence is so ennobling as
George Eliot's." I entirely agree. She is the
great tragic poet of our age. She was to her day
and generation, what Euripides was to his. I do
not know who has more luminously summed up
her work, than that acute and accomplished critic,
Edmond Scherer, in words with which I shall end
this Lecture.
" She paints, it is true, only ordinary life: her
favourite heroes are children, artisans, labourers ;
her favourite subjects, middle-class absurdities, the
prejudices of the little town, the superstitions of
the country. But, under these externals of prosaic
existence, she makes us assist at the eternal
tragedy of the human heart ; the failures of the
will, the calculations of egotism, pride, coquetry,
hatred, love, all our passions, and all our weak-
nesses, all our littlenesses, all our deviations— all
are set down in her pages. Nor is this all. A
sort of perfume of wisdom emanates from her
creations ; a sort of teaching of experience flows
from them. George Eliot contemplates the faults
of men with so much sympathy, mingled with such
elevation of thought, the condemnation she passes
on evil is so tempered by help and comprehension,
the smile on her face is so near tears, she is so
clear-sighted and so resigned, she knows so much
about our miseries, she has herself suffered and
lived so much, that we cannot read her pages
I
/
114 GEOBGE ELIOT. [lect. hi.
without feeling ourselves won to that lofty tolera-
tion of hers. We are moved and we are tran-
quillized ; she seems to have enlarged our ideas of
the world and of God. And when we close the
book, we find ourselves more at peace with our-
selves, more calm face to face with the problems
of Destiny."
LECTURE IV.
THE HUMOURIST AS PROPHET.
CABLYLE.
LECTURE IV.
THE HUMOURIST AS PROPHET.
CABLYLE.
Some time ago a series of articles appeared in one
of the magazines — I think it was an American
magazine — entitled, Boohs That Have Helped Me.
Various men of letters recorded therein their
obligations to one or another writer, whom they
had found of special assistance in forming their
intellectual or spiritual character. Now, for
myself, there is no thinker, no teacher, to whom
I am more deeply indebted than Thomas Carlyle.
I remember how when I was an undergraduate
at Cambridge, his books came to me as a great
awakening, leading me to look for myself, as
best I could, at the problems of human life and
human destiny. I remember, moreover, that I
read many of them at a season of sickness, and
how particularly valuable they were to me then.
" My son," said the dying Herder, when heart and
flesh failed him, as his malady increased, and his
strength decayed, '' my son, repeat to me some
great thought ; nothing else will refresh me."
118 CABLYLE. [lect.
Well, I, in my weakness and weariness, derived
something of that refreshment from the writings
of Carlyle. Nor has time dimmed my devotion
for him, although on many important matters I
am far from thinking as he did. You remember
John Sterling's testimony in a letter written to
him in the consciousness of swiftly approaching
death. " Towards me it is still more true than
towards England, that no man has been and done
like you." The feeling which these words express,
is my own feeling.
Such affection and reverence for this great
sage and teacher were, I suppose, very widespread
during the last twenty or thirty years of his life.
And " the explosion of the doggeries," as he might
himself have said, which took place shortly after
his death, was no doubt as painful to many others
as it was to me. It was the opportunity of the
gigmen, and they made the most of it. The
" twenty seven millions of people, mostly fools,"
had their revenge. Now that the howling has
died away, I may be permitted to sa}' a very few
words regarding the occasion of it. A number of
documents which Carlyle had left, were published
by the man of letters to whom they had been
entrusted. Many of them, beyond all question,
were never intended by Carlyle for publication.
And these were eagerly seized upon as discreditable
to him. They exhibited acrid, and, in some cases,
untenable judgments passed by him upon certain
IV.] EMINENTLY HUMAN. 119
of the most famous of Ms contemporaries. They
exhibited him as wanting in consideration for, in
tenderness to, one of the brightest and noblest
women whom any man ever had the privilege of
calling wife. Well, what can we, who love and
liononr Carlyle, say in extenuation of his faults ?
Several things, I think, may be said. In the first
place the man was eminently human — he would
never have done the work he did if he had not
been that ; acutely sensitive, hasty in temper, and
quick to express his grievances, real or imaginary.
Listen to the testimony of another great man
about himself —
" I'm ashamed of myself, of my tears and my tongue :
So easily fretted, so often unstrung ;
Mad at trifles to which a chance moment gives birth,
Complaining of heaven and complaining of earth."
Do you know who wrote those verses ? I will
tell you. The man who wrote those verses
honoured me with his friendship for many years,
and I discerned in him one of the best and holiest
men that ever lived. Those self-accusatory verses
were written by Cardinal Newman. And they
are true. He would never have written them if
they had not been. They paint truly one side of
his character of which he was intensely conscious ;
of which his friends were conscious, but not so
intensely. Well, the feeling which they express
must often have been Carlyle's. Yes, and Mrs.
Carlyle's too. Is there any of us who could
120 CARLYLE. [tect.
endure the test of the hirid glare of publicity cast
upon our most private thoughts, our most un-
guarded and undisciplined utterances ? I am sure
I could not. I do not beheve any one could.
Should we like such thoughts and utterances to be
published to the world ? Would it be fair to us ?
Would it give a really true impression of us?
Consider the magnifying effect of print. A word
harmless or almost harmless in conversation, or
even in a letter, or a diary, often acquires a
sinister significance in the fierce light which beats
upon a book. I protest against the cynicism to
which nothing is sacred. Those great principles
of reticence, reverence, reserve, which as I said in
a former Lecture, have their endless applications
in civilized life, assuredly come in here. I know
of no worse sign of the times than the prurient
curiosity just now so rife about the petty details
— if scandalous so much the better — of the lives
of eminent persons. I know of no more igno-
minious occupation than theirs who minister to it.
" For now the poet cannot die
Nor leave his music as of old,
But round him, ere he scarce be cold,
Begins the scandal and the cry.
Proclaim the faults he would not show,
Break lock and key : betray the trust,
Keep nothing sacred ; 'tis but just
The many-headed beast should know."
Ah the shame of it !
Carlyle, then, was intensely human. And for
IV.] THE PORTION OF GENIUS. 121
that reason faults and foibles incident to humanity
came out in him more strongly than they are
wont to come out in more animal men. Again,
he was a man of genius ; and it is an old saying
and a true, " Nullum magnum ingenium sine
melancolia." Melancholy — Johnson defines it
as *' a gloomy, pensive, and discontented temper "
— is ever, more or less, the portion of genius. You
know Goethe's saying that the more the light,
the darker the shadow: "Wo viel Licht ist, ist
starker Schatten." " One pays dear for any
intellect one may have," Carlyle wrote in his
Journal. " It means primarily, sensibility, which
again means injury, pain, misery from unconscious
nature or conscious or unconscious man ; in fact,
a heavy burden, painful to bear, however piously
you take it." Then, again, remember Caiiyle's
origin and early training. Still sadness — it is not
necessarily unhappiness — is impressed upon the
peasant life of Scotland. Wherever Puritanism
has prevailed, " glory and loveliness have passed
away " from common existence. " Out of the day
a joy hath taken flight." So much is unquestion-
able truth. I am well aware it is not the whole
truth. If grace and gladness have drooped under
a Puritanical regimen, the more severe and Stoical
virtues have flourished. This by the way. But
Carlyle's irritability and acidity are also traceable
immediately to a physical cause. As we all know,
he was a lifelong martyr to dyspepsia. Perhaps
122 CABLYLE. [lect.
this was an incident of his prophetic calling. It
is difficult to think of a prophet — unless it be,
perhaps, Balaam the son of Beor — as eupeptic.
How is it possible for '' one who feels the im-
measurable world," one who lives — the expression
is Carlyle's — " in a continual element of black
broken by lightnings," one who is ever haunted
by starthng or lugubrious visions, one whose scroll
is written within and without with lamentations
and mourning and woe, to keep a good digestion ?
The Hebrew prophets — Moses and Samuel, Elijah
and Elisha, Jeremiah and Jonah, for example —
must have been as " gey ill to deal wi' " as
Carlyle himself. Assuredly we may say the
same of the Hellenic . prophets, if Teu^esias, as
we find him in the Greek tragedies, is a true
type of them. One must expect a prophet to be
somewhat arbitrary, choleric, uncomfortable, and
unfair, as Carlyle often was. But every one who
knew him well — that was not my privilege — found
him the most generous, the most tender hearted,
the kindliest of men. Thrifty in his personal
habits, even in his extreme age, "his one ex-
pensive luxury," as Mr. Froude has finely observed,
" was charity." " Carlyle, best of all men, kept
the manly attitude in his time," said Emerson. It
appears to me that the saying is well warranted.
So much of the man. We are concerned with
IV.] NOT A GBEAT EISTOBIAN. 123
him to-day in the character of The Humourist
as Prophet. Unlike the other three humourists,
who have been the subjects of the preceding
Lectures, he did not work in the domain of
romantic fiction. He viewed, indeed, the art of
the novelist with some disdain — quite wrongly,
I think — abandoning to him " children, minors,
and semi-fatuous persons." And yet, I may
observe, in passing, his translation of Goethe's
novel, Wilhelm Meister, was one of his most
cherished productions. However, he found the
novel too frivolous in form for the word which he
had to speak. The historical narrative, the essay,
the fantastic medley, were better suited to his
mission. I can hardly, indeed, reckon him a
great historian in spite of his Frencli Revolution,
his Cromwell, his Frederick. His French Revolu-
tion is not history in the proper sense of the
word. It is a set of Imid pictures illustrative of
that great event, by an artist of singular power,
pictures which bring out its real significance in
a quite unique manner. His Croimuell is essen-
tially the portrait of a soul : a very skilfully con-
structed autobiography with connecting narrative
and reflections, exhibiting its subject with a
vividness never surpassed, so far as I know, in
that species of composition. His Frederick appeals
to us chiefly as a comedy of humours, and I, for
my part, always regret that its author lavished
so much time over military details, now of little
124 CARLYLE. [lect.
interest save to professional warriors. In Carlyle
tlie historian is quite subordinate to the humourist.
For assuredly a humourist he is, in the fullest
sense of the word, as we defined it in the First
Lecture ; an artist who playfully gives us his
intuition of the world and of human life. His
playfulness is usually of the grimmest — the play-
fulness of the lion or of the bear. And it is his
distinctive note. A very competent critic observes,
'* It will not be pretended that Carlyle has written
anything so fine as Gulliver' ; and he would have
been the first to own that there is a dehcate
sparkling mischievousness in Sterne which he
cannot come near. But for broad Hogarthian
humour he has no equal. And his single strokes
are miraculous. There is nothing he depicts but
he sees it before him. To the reader he makes
things solid as well as visible. . . . Such a master
of word-painting there never was in English
literature." " The style is the man," says Buffon,
and it is a most profound saying. Nothing is
more idle than to set up what I may call an
abstract standard of hterary perfection, in entire
independence of the writer's character and aims.
Taine, if my memory is not at fault, replying to
a critic who objected that Balzac did not know
French, said, " Balzac knew French as well as any
one, but he employed it in his own way." The
saying would apply to Carlyle. Carlyle's style is
Carlylese. It would be the most affected of
IV.] THE PBOPHETIC GIFT. 125
affectations for any one else to write in it. To
liim it was perfectly natural — as natural as the
Miltonic style was to Milton. And that is its
sufficient vindication. It was the only style in
which he could deliver his prophetic message.
For as a prophet I assuredly hold him. When
I say, " a prophet," I do not, of course, mean a
propounder of caliginous conundrums for future
generations to solve. I mean a man who, by
vii'tue of the insight, the inspiration that is in
him, sees through phenomena into reality : who
rightly reads and interprets the signs of his times,
and discerns beneath them —
" The baby figure of the giant mass
Of things to come at large."
This is admirably expressed in some words of
Carlyle's : "A Messenger sent from the Infinite
Unknown with tidings to us, . . . direct from the
Inner Fact of things — he lives, and has to hve, in
daily communication with that. Hearsays cannot
hide it from him. He is blind, homeless, miser-
able, following hearsays. It glares upon him."
"The Vates,'' he elsewhere tells us, "has pene-
trated into the sacred mystery of the universe :
the open secret, as Goethe calls it, which few
discover. He has apprehended the Divine Idea of
the world which lies at the bottom of appearances.
So Fichte speaks." And thus we may describe
126 CABLYLE. [lect.
liim in the Hebrew phrase, as the man whose
eyes are opened. Carlyle proceeds by intuition
and affirmation, the true prophetic method. He
exhorts, entreats, threatens, denounces, condemns;
he seldom reasons. " The most clairvoyant in-
tellect of our age," Taine calls him : I think, with
justice. No one else has so clearly discerned the
signs of the times, or so truly read the lessons
which they convey.
We know the spiritual history of the man. He
has himself written it for us, especially in his
Sartor Resartus and his Reminiscences. We know
how, brought up by pious parents in the straitest
sect of Calvinism, he was led in early manhood
to reject its bankrupt bibliolatry and its super-
annuated superstitions. We know how for seven
years he abode in the wilderness of doubt and
denial, weighed down by " the burden and the
mystery of all this unintelligible world." You
remember the passage in Faust, where Mephisto-
pheles, '' der Geist der stets verneint," preaches
the doctrine of the Everlasting No : it were better
that all should perish, that night and chaos should
resume their ancient sway. " Thus did the be-
wildered wanderer stand, as so many have done,
shouting question after question into the Sibyl
cave of Destiny, and receiving no answer but an
echo. It was all a grim desert, this once fair
world of his ; wherein was heard the howling of
wild beasts, or the shriek of despairing hate-filled
IV.] THE '^ EVEBLASTING NO." 127
men ; and no pillar of Cloud by day, and no pillar
of Fire by night, any more guarded the Pilgrim.
. . . The Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose,
of Volition, even of Hostility : it was one huge
immeasurable steam engine, rolling on in its dead
indifference to grind him limb from limb. the
vast, gloomy, solitary Golgotha and Mill of
Death ! " This '' Everlasting No " has been sung
by a poet of oui* day in verse of terrible beauty —
" To thank with, brief thanksgiving'
Whatever gods may be,
That no life lives for ever,
That dead men rise up never,
That e'en the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."
Atheism this is, of the blackest kind, unrelieved
by a single ray propitious. How Carlyle passed
out of this Valley of the Shadow of Death into
the sunshine of the " Everlasting Yea," he has
told us, in mystic utterance.
"What is Nature? Ha! why do I not name
thee God ? Art not thou the ' Living Garment of
God ' ? Heavens, is it, in very deed, He, then,
that ever speaks through thee ; that lives and
loves in thee, that lives and loves in me ? Fore-
shadows, call them rather fore-splendours, of that
Truth, and Beginning of Truths, fell mysteriously
over my soul. Sweeter than Dayspriug to the
shipwrecked in Nova Zembla ; ah, like the
mother's voice to her Httle child that strays
bewildered, weeping, in unknown tumults ; like
128 GABLYLE. [lect.
soft streamings of celestial music to my too-
exasperated heart, came that Evangel. The
Universe is not dead and demoniacal, a charnel-
house with spectres ; hut godlike, and my Father's !
With other eyes, too, could I now look upon my
fellow-man : with an infinite Love, and infinite
Pity. Poor, wandering, wayward man ! Art thou
not tried, and beaten with stripes even as I am ?
Ever, whether thou hear the royal mantle or the
beggar's gabardine, art thou not so weary, so
heavy-laden ; and thy Bed of Rest is but a
Grave.
*****
" Well did the Wisest of our time write : ' It is
only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life,
properly speaking, can be said to begin.' I asked
myself: What is this that, ever since earliest
years, thou hast been fretting and fuming, and
lamenting and self-tormenting, on account of?
Say it in a word, is it not because thou art not
Happy ? Because the Thou (sweet gentleman) is
not sufficiently honoured, nourished, soft-bedded,
and lovingly cared-for ? Foolish soul ! what Act
of Legislature was there that tJio7i shouldst be
Happy ? A little while ago thou hadst no right to
be at all. What if thou wert born and predestined
not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy ! Art thou
nothing other than a Vulture, then, that fliest
through the Universe seeking after somewhat to
eat ; and shrieking dolefully because carrion
enough is not given thee ? Close thy Byron ;
open thy Goethe. ' Es leuchtet mir ein.' ' I
see a glimpse of it ! ' cries he elsewhere : ' there
ly.] "E5 LEUCETET MIB EIN T' 129
is in man a Higher than Love of Happiness: he can
do without Happiness, and instead thereof find
Blessedness ! ' Was it not to preach forth this
same Higher, that sages and martyrs, the Poet
and the Priest, in all times, have spoken and
suffered; bearing testimony, through life and
through death, of the Godlike that is in Man,
and how in the Godlike only has he Strength and
Freedom ? Which God-inspired Doctrine art thou
also honoured to be taught ; Heavens ! and
broken with manifold merciful Afflictions, even till
thou become contrite, and learn it ! 0, thank
thy Destiny for these ; thankfully bear what yet
remain: thou hadst need of them; the Self in thee
needed to be annihilated. By benignant fever-
paroxysms is Life rooting out the deep-seated
chronic Disease, and triumphs over Death. On
the roaring billows of Time, thou art not engulfed,
but borne aloft into the azure of Eternity. Love
not Pleasure ; love God. This is the Everlasting
Yea, wherein all contradiction is solved : wherein
whoso walks and works, it is well with him."
*' Es leuchtet mir ein! " The light breaks upon
me. And in that divine radiance the universe was
transfigured. I observe, in passing, that some
foolish persons, on the strength of such expres-
sions as that which I have just read, " Ah,
Nature, why do I not name thee God ? " have
labelled Carlyle a Pantheist. If by Pantheism
is meant — and that is the proper meaning of the
word — " that speculative system which by abso-
lutely identifying the subject and the object of
K
130 CABLYLE. [lect.
thought, reduces all existence, mental and material,
to phenomenal modifications of one eternal self-
existing Substance," Carlyle was assuredly no
Pantheist. Such a doctrine as that would have
seemed to him the most stupid of blasphemies.
He was as far as any man could be from holding
that all is God. He did assuredly hold that all
is in God ; the doctrine taught by Plato to the
men of Athens, iravra irX-qpr] Oea>v, TrXtjpr) xljv)(rjs,
and recalled to them by St. Paul, " In Him we
live and move and have our being : " a doctrine
which Krause has not inappropriately called Panen-
theism. And this belief transfigured for him the
whole universe.
"For Matter, were it never so despicable, is
Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit : were it never
so honourable, can it be more ? The thing visible,
nay the thing imagined, the thing in any way con-
ceived as visible, what is it but a garment, a
clothing of the higher, celestial, invisible, un-
imaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright ?
All visible things are emblems ; what thou seest
is not there on its own account, strictly taken, is
not there at all : Matter exists only spiritually,
and to represent some Idea and body it forth."
Again, consider another passage in which he
adopts — or perhaps I should say adapts — Kant's
well-known doctrine as to space and time.
" Deepest of all illusory Appearances, for hiding
Wonder, as for many other ends, are your two
IV.] OBLIGATIONS TO GOETHE. 131
grand fundamental world-enveloping Appearances,
Space and Time. These are spun and woven for
us from before Birth itself, to clothe our celestial
Me for dwelling here, and yet to bhnd it, — lie all-
embracing, as the universal canvas, or warp and
woof, whereby all minor Illusions, in this Phantasm
Existence, weave and paint themselves."
I must leave you to follow out this matter
further, if you think well, for your own selves.
Here, I observe, that Carlyle, writing years after,
testified, "I then felt and still feel endlessly
indebted to Goethe in this business." What
those obligations precisely were he has never told
us. And this remark is generally accounted
among his dark sayings. Certainly Goethe's
whole ethos — his cast of thought — differs much
from Carlyle's. That must be plain to every one
who reads the two, even with moderate attention.
Perhaps what most helped Carlyle in this great
spiritual crisis is the Hellenic largeness of life that
breathes through Goethe : the " ampler ether, the
diviner air," in which, well-nigh asphyxiated as
he was by the fogs and miasma of the Valley of
the Shadow of Death, he breathed freely like man
new made. " No one can read me," said Goethe,
" without gaining a certain interior liberty." But
more than this. Who can deny that a great deal
of what passes current as Christianity, in every
form of it, is but thinly disguised Materialism ?
The great central truth taught by Christ and His
132 CABLYLE. [lect.
Apostles of dying to the world, to the life of the
senses, of rising to an ideal, a divine life, lies
buried under a mass of shibboleths and sophisms
and superstitions. Now I do not know any one
who has more emphatically proclaimed this truth
than Goethe. "Die and live again," he exhorts
us, " for until thou hast done that thou art but a
troubled guest on this dark earth."
" Stirb und werde ;
Denn so lang du das nicht hast,
Bist du nur ein triiber Gast
Auf der dunkelu Erde."
How much more to the same effect there is in
Goethe I need not say. May not this well have
come home to Carlyle in his anxious, heartstricken
search after light, with an even deeper meaning
than Goethe was conscious of? "Poets," says
Plato, " utter great and wise things which they
do not themselves understand." However that
may be, certain it is that from this time forth
Carlyle felt he had a message to his day and
generation. And he began to preach and to teach
with an intense conviction, that led Goethe at
once to recognize in him " a new moral force, the
extent and effect of which it was impossible to
predict." One thinks of the similar crisis in the
life of the great Arabian prophet, concerning
whom Carlyle has written so appreciatively, when
the Voice came to him upon Mount Hira, bidding
him " Cry in the name of the Lord." The two
men had much in common.
IV.] TWO ELEMENTAL FACTS. 133
But I must not pause to work out that parallel.
Let us go on to inquire, more closely what was
the faith that lived in Thomas Carlyle, which
breathed through all his teaching — there is a
singular spiritual unity in his work — and which
made it such a wonderful power. Mr. Froude
has epigrammatically described that teaching as
" Calvinism without the theology." It is not an
accurate description. Accuracy was not among
Mr. Froude's many high gifts. Carlyle rejected
much of Calvinistic theology. He retained two of
its essential verities — so he regarded them, and, as
I think, with amplest warrant. He tried to get
down to the primal, the elemental facts of Keligion
and of Life that underlay Calvinistic theology.
He found two which he deemed self-evident, borne
in upon him with irresistible power ; truths which
he could no more doubt than his own existence.
The first is — there was no getting beyond this,
as he judged — that the Infinite reveals itself to
the living spirit. You remember the verses of
Tennyson —
" Speak to Him, thou, for He hears, and spirit with spirit can
meet :
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and
feet."
That expresses Carlyle's deepest conviction. It
is merely an expansion of St. Augustine's profound
dictum — never was so high a truth compressed
into two words — "Internum, sternum." "He
134 CABLYLE. [lect.
who traces nothing of God in his own soul,"
Carlyle wrote, '^ will never find God in the world
of matter : mere circlings of force there, of uni-
versal death, of merciless indifference, nothing
but a dead steam engine there." And it was this
revelation in the microcosm that explained for
him the macrocosm —
" The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the
plains —
Are not these, soul, the vision of Him who reigns ? "
The poet, you see, turns to his own soul for the
answer to the question. So did Carlyle. Keason
everywhere was the reply, in the external universe
as well as the internal. " I should go distracted,"
he said to Tyndall — and we cannot doubt that the
words were Hterally true — " if I were not sure that
intellect is at the heart of things." This is what
he called the ''Divine Idea in the universe," bor-
rowing a phrase from Fichte, by whose philosophy
he was greatly influenced at one time. Carlyle
felt that to make unreason the last word of the
universe is the suicide of reason ; which is pretty
much what Kant meant — he was speaking
indeed from another point of view — when he said
that if law could perish, the whole worth of life
would perish with it. Divine Eeason at the heart
of things, a Supreme Moral Governor of man and
of the universe — that was for Carlyle the first of
certitudes. "A world," he says, " in which if we
did not know of very truth that God presided
IV.] TRANSCENDENTALISM. 135
over it, and did incessantly guide it towards good
and not towards evil, we were uncontrollably
wretched."
Such was Garlyle's Theism — clear to him as
the sun at noonday, and the very sun of his soul ;
a self-evident fact standing in no need of " evi-
dences," for which he felt the intensest scorn, and
permeating his whole being. Equally clear to
him, as a fact in the world of consciousness, was
what Kant has called "the categorical imperative
of duty," the eternal distinction between Eight
and Wrong, and the unqualified obligation to
follow Eight laid upon us by the law within,
written on the fleshly tables of the heart. His
conception of the moral law, like Kant's, was in
the strictest sense transcendental. It appeared
to him that when Eeason pronounces " This is so
and must be so," we transcend the limits of time
and space, and are let into eternity. Kant puts it
tersely, "The command, 'Thou shalt not lie,' is
not valid for men alone : it is valid for all
rational beings as well as men : for the basis of
the obligation is not in the nature of men but
a priori in the pure conception of the Eeason."
And this, Kant adds, holds of all moral laws
which are properly such. Now, it is upon these
universal and necessary ideals of truth and right,
and upon these only, as Carlyle intensely be-
lieved, that the whole fabric of ordered human
life, both public and private, rests. They are the
136 CABLYLE. [lect.
everlasting rock on which alone it can he rightly
reared; a rock on which the storms of passion
and of circumstance will beat in vain ; and other
foundation can no man lay. I take it Carlyle
would have adopted the words of Fichte, " Most
certain it is, and, indeed, the ground of all other
certainty, that the moral order of the world
exists : that for every intelligent being there is
an appointed work which he is expected to per-
form ; and that every circumstance of his life is
part of a plan." Individual existence appeared
to Carlyle a time of moral probation. And he
thought the same of national existence. He fully
agreed with Schiller that the history of the world
is the judgment of the world. "■ Die Weltgeschichte
ist das Weltgericht." And here is the explanation
of his often misunderstood doctrine of might and
right. "No man," he once testified of himself,
"was ever more contemptuous of might, except
when it rests on right." " Suppose I did say
that might is right," he observed to an American
gentleman, " I know what I meant by it : not what
you think I meant. There is a true meaning in
it. A man is an atheist who believes that in the
long run, what God allows to triumph is not
right."
Such, in the barest outlines, were the essen-
tial, the fundamental, the vital behefs of Thomas
IV.] VITAL BELIEFS. 137
Carlyle. I say "vital," for to him they were not
mere speculations, but living and life-giving facts ;
the very essential condition of all true and worthy
existence, individual or collective. Is it objected
that there is nothing new in them ? I answer, I
know that : St. Thomas Aquinas taught them, with
much clearness and precision, six centuries ago.
Carlyle was no setter forth of strange gods. There
are no such things as new truths in religion or
ethics. The essential verities of religion and
ethics, as Antigone tells us —
" are not of to-day or yesterday,
But ever live, and no one knows their birth-tide."
Like Him, in whom they are fully realized, they
are from everlasting to everlasting, nor is there
in them any variableness or shadow of turning.
The formulas in which we clothe them change ;
the light in which they present themselves varies :
but they are the same, and their years shall not
fail.
These are the fundamental truths, then, which
Carlyle preached for more than four decades to
mankind with an almost savage earnestness —
"here," as he expresses it, "in this fog Babylon,
amid the mud and smoke, in the infinite din
of vociferous platitude and quack out-bellowing
quack." It appeared to him that these truths had
largely lost their hold on men's hearts and lives.
You remember his definition of religion in one of
his Lectures on Heroes.
138 CABLYLE. [lect.
"A man's religion is the chief fact with regard
to him. A man's or a nation of men's. By
rehgion I do not mean here the church creed
which he professes, the articles of faith which he
will sign, and, in words or otherwise, assert ; not
this wholly, in many cases not this at all. We
see men of all kinds of professed creeds attain to
almost all degrees of worth or worthlessness under
each or any of them. This is not what I call
religion, this profession and assertion ; which is
often only a profession and assertion from the
outworks of the man, from the mere argumentative
region of him, if even so deep as that. But the
thing a man does practically believe (and this
is often enough ivithout asserting it even to him-
self, much less to others) ; the thing a man does
practically lay to heart, and know for certain,
concerning his vital relations with this mysterious
Universe, and his duty and destiny there, that
is in all cases the primary thing for him, and
creatively determines all the rest. That is his
religion; or, it may be, his mere scepticism and
no-religion : the manner it is in which he feels
himself to be spiritually related to the Unseen
World or No-world ; and I say, if you tell me
what that is, you tell me to a very great extent
what the man is, what the kind of things he will
do is."
Judging England by this test, Carlyle found that
our chief God is Mammon — " Gain, the master idol
of this realm," Wordsworth had said before him :
that our real heaven is success, our real hell not
IV.] BENTHAMISM. 139
making money. He knew well that practical
Atheism is compatible with a profession of
Christianity not consciously false. He saw, too,
— who could help seeing — that anything more
utterly discrepant from the idea of the New
Testament than the ethos of modern society
is not easily conceivable. He found even the
belief in the eternal distinction between right and
wrong largely set aside by a philosophy, much
in credit, which teaches that virtue and vice,
justice and injustice, good and evil, are mere
matters of cunning calculation. That philosophy
seemed to him the appropriate philosophy of an
age of practical Atheism.
" It seems to me all deniers of Godhood, and
all lip-believers of it, are bound to be Benthamites,
if they have courage and honesty. I call this
gross steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach
towards new faith. It was a laying-down of cant ;
a saying to oneself, ' Well then, this world is a
dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation
and selfish hunger ; let us see what, by checking
and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth
and pinion, can be made of it ! ' Benthamism
has something complete, manful, in such fearless
committal of itself to what it finds true ; you may
call it heroic, though a heroism with its eyes
put out ! . . . I would wish all men to know and
lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but
mechanism in the universe has in the fatalest
way missed the secret of the universe altogether.
140 CABLYLE. [lect.
That all Godliood should vanish out of men's
conception of the universe seems to me precisely
the most brutal error — I will not disparage
heathenism by calling it a heathen error, — that
men could fall into. It is not true ; it is false
at the very heart of it. A man who thinks so
will think ivrong about all things in the world;
this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions
he can form."
And it did, in very truth, seem to him that men
in general do now think wrong about all things
in the world. Our social, our political arrange-
ments, appeared to him, unveracious, unjust, and
doomed. He read " Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,"
plainly written on them. That, as he considered,
was the meaning of the popular movement
throughout Europe, little as its leaders knew ; that
the monition which it addressed to the governing
classes. You remember the inimitable way in
which he uses the story of Balaam to impress
this view : Balaam, whom he elsewhere calls, " the
father of such as wear shovel hats."
" The case alluded to stands recorded in the
Booh of Numhers : the case of Balaam the son of
Beor. Truly if we consider it, there are few
passages more notable and pregnant in their way,
than this of Balaam. The Midianitish Soothsayer
(Truth-speaker, or as we should say now, Counsel-
giver and Senator) is journeying forth, as he has
from of old quite prosperously done, in the way
IV.] BALAAM THE SON OF BEOB. 141
of his vocation ; not so much to ' curse the people
of the Lord,' as to earn for himself a comfort-
able penny by such means as are possible and
expedient ; something it is hoped, midway between
cursing and blessing ; which shall not, except in
case of necessity, be either a curse or a blessing,
or indeed be anything so much as a Nothing that
will look like a Something and bring wages in.
For the man is not dishonest ; far from it ; still
less is he honest ; but above all things, he is, has
been and will be, respectable. Did calumny ever
dare to fasten itself on the fair fame of Balaam ?
In his whole walk and conversation, has he not
shown consistency enough ; ever doing and speak-
ing the thing that was decent ; with proper spirit
maintaining his status ; so that friend and
opponent must often compliment him, and defy
the spiteful world to say. Herein art thou a
Knave ? And now as he jogs along, in official
comfort, with brave official retinue, his heart
filled with good things, his head with schemes for
the Suppression of Vice, and the Cause of civil
and religious Liberty all over the world : — consider
what a spasm and life- clutching ice-taloned pang,
must have shot through the brain and pericardium
of Balaam, when his Ass not only on the sudden
stood stock-still, defying spur and cudgel, but —
began to talk, and that in a reasonable manner !
Did not his face, elongating, collapse, and
tremour occupy his joints ? For the thin crust
of Respectability has cracked asunder ; and a
bottomless preternatural Inane yawns under him
instead. Farewell, a long farewell to all his great-
ness : the spirit-stirring Vote, ear-piercing Hear ;
142 CABLYLE. [lect.
the big Speech that makes ambition virtue ; soft
Palm-greasing first of raptures, and Cheers that
emulate sphere music ; Balaam's occupation's
gone."
This of Balaam was written in 1832. It occurs
in an article entitled Corn Lata Rhymes, which
appeared in the Edinburgh lievieiu. And it is to
me of special interest as being, I think, the first
clear indication of Carlyle's WeUa7ischauung , of
his outlook on the condition of the world around
him. I do not forget his two earlier essays —
both masterpieces — Signs of the Times, and
Characteristics, and the pregnant hints they give
of the workings of his mind regarding political
and social problems. But in this article, Corii
Laiv Rhymes, he strikes, so to speak, the key-note
of his prophetic message concerning the condition
of England, to an age "when public and private
Principle, as the word was once understood,
having gone out of sight, and Self-interest being
left to plot, and struggle, and scramble, as it could
and would, difficulties had accumulated till they
were no longer to be borne, and the spirit that
should have fronted and conquered them seemed
to have forsaken the world ; when the Kich, as
the utmost they could resolve on, had ceased to
govern : and the Poor, in their fast-accumulating
numbers, and ever-widening complexities, had
ceased to be able to do without governing, and now
IV.] THE BUB DEN OF ENGLAND. 143
the plan of ' Competition ' and ' Laissez-faire ' was,
on every side, approaching its consummation ; and
each, bound up in the circle of his own wants and
perils, stood dimly distrustful of his neighbour, and
the distracted Common-weal was a Common-woe."
Here we have, in outline, that burden of
England (to use the Hebraic phrase) which
Carlyle was to utter. Transcendentalist as he
essentially was, he was no mere preacher of
theoretic beliefs, of abstract dogmas, of rewards
and punishments beyond the grave. He was a
witness to men of what they ought to believe and
to do ; reasoning of righteousness, temperance, and
judgment to come : to come in this life, for he
assuredly believed, with the Hebrew seer, '^Verily
there is a God that judgeth the earth." He dwelt
little on the ultimate solution in another life, of the
problems of human existence and destiny, " I
will not ask or guess," he wrote in his Journal in
1854, *' I will not ask or guess {hnoiv, no man ever
could or can) what He has appointed for His poor
creatures of the earth : a right and good and wise
appointment it full surely is. Let me look to it
with pious manfulness, without either hope or fear
that were excessive." His concern was with the
problems of human existence and destiny as they
affect us in this world. The Great Darkness,
whence we come and whither we go, was ever
present to him. But it was present as a monition
to work while we have the light. " Man is here in
144 CABLYLE. [lect.
the centre of immensities, in the conflux of eterni-
ties, with but one life to lead, not in frivolity or self-
indulgence, but in noble self-denial." Like the
old Jewish seers, who were his spiritual ancestors,
his it was to read the signs of the times and to
interpret them to the multitude, without eyes to
see, without heart to understand : to set forth
those verities by adhering to which England had
attained all her greatness in the past, and in
renewed loyalty to which, alone, was her hope for
the future. And necessity was laid upon him, as
upon those Jewish seers. He spoke not of him-
self. "I felt a kind of call and monition to do
it," he said of his book on Chartism — given to the
world in 1839 — the most stirring appeal to the
national conscience which had been made since
the days of Burke. "The thing," he said, "has
been in my head and heart these ten, some of it,
these twenty years : one is right glad to be
delivered of such a thing on any terms." He
predicted that it would be " equally astonishing
to Girondists, Radicals, do-nothing Aristocrats,
Conservatives, and dilettante unbelieving Whigs "
— Whigs of whom his Balaam was meant to be
the type. He was right. Such plain speaking
about the poor, their rights, and their wrongs,
puzzled politicians. Men asked of it, as they
asked in later years of another famous book,
" What man will it serve, what party ? " To the
rank and file of Benthamite Radicals, it was
IV.] PARLIAMENT ABY BADICALISM. 145
especially unwelcome, although the greatest of
them, John Stuart Mill, was delighted with it.
"What has ParKamentary Eadicalism obtained
for the people ? What other than shadows of
things has it so much as asked for them ? "
he inquired. But those Parliamentary Eadicals
beheved that since the Eeform Act of 1832,
England had been making rapid progress ; that
her prosperity had been increasing by leaps and
bounds. To Carlyle the progress appeared like that
of the Gadarene swine, swift certainly, but tend-
ing to the steep place and the engulfing sea ; the
prosperity dazzling, indeed, but a phosphorescence
of Mammonism : not a celestial, but an infernal
radiance. Indeed, the question which this brochure
propounded, "Is the condition of the English
working people wrong : so wrong that rational men
cannot, will not, and even should not rest quiet
under it?" was resented as both new and incon-
venient. Honourable members, within those walls
at Westminster, were occupied with quite other
matters. " You read Hansard Debates, or the
morning papers, if you have nothing to do ! The
old grave question whether A. is to be in office
or B., with the subsidiary questions growing out
of that — all manner of questions and subjects,
except simply the Alpha and Omega of all."
Well, by this book on Chartism^ Carlyle had,
for the time, liberated his soul. But two years
later, the voice within said to him once more,
L
146 CABLYLE. [lect.
" Cry." He was trying to gird himself up to the
writing of Cromivell. But — so he wrote to SterHng
— his heart was " sick to look at the things now
going on in this England." He felt, as he ex-
presses it, in his wild imagery, " a mass as of
chaotic rubhish continents, lying on him, crushing
him into silence " concerning all else : a weight
of which he must rid himself before he spoke
of aught else. " He felt," in Mr. Froude's
words, " that he had something to say, some-
thing which he ought to say, about the present
time to the present age ; something of infinite
importance to it. England, as he saw it,
was saturated with cant, dosed to surfeit with
doctrines only half true or not true at all. The
progress so loudly talked of was progress down-
wards : and rapid and easy because it was down-
wards. There was not a statesman who could do
honestly what he thought to be right and keep his
office ; not a member of Parliament who could
vote by his conscience and keep his seat. Chartism
had been a partial relief, but the very attention
which it had met with was an invitation to say
more, and he had an inward impulse which was
forcing him on to say it." At last, in the autumn
of 1842 — a time of dire distress in this country —
he wrote to his mother that he could not " go
on with Cromivell or anything until he had dis-
burdened his heart somewhat in regard to all
that." He had come accidentally upon an old
IV.] AN OVEBLOADED HEART. 147
chronicle of Jocelyn de Brackelonde, a monk of
St. Edmondsbury, presenting a vivid picture of
English life in the twelfth century. That gave
him the text of Past and Present. Of the mar-
vellous literary merit of the book — its pathos,
its humour, its creative power whereby that far-off
century is made to live before us — I need not
speak. Lockhart, who was then editing the
Quarterly Beview, told Carlyle that it was a book
such as no other man could do, or dream of doing ;
that it had made him conscious of life and feeling
as he had never been before. Carlyle wrote in his
Journal, " It has been to me a considerable reUef
to see it fairly out of me, and I look at the dis-
astrous condition of England with much more
patience for the present, my conscience no longer
reproaching me with any duty that I could do and
was neglecting to do."
Past and Present no doubt added much to
Carlyle's literary reputation. But its teaching
was received, generally, with incredulity, and,
largely, with indignation. It was not, however,
until 1850 that he fully braved the " ardor civium
prava jubentium " by his Latter Day Pamiolilets, in
which his most scathing ridicule, his fiercest
denunciations of the existing public order are
contained. In his Reminiscences he speaks of
Latter Pay Pamphlet time, and especially the time
that preceded it (1848), " as very sore and heavy."
" My heart," he says, "was long overloaded with
148 CABLYLE. [lect.
the meanings at length nttered there — black
electricities and consuming fires." He resolved
to convey those meanings, at all hazards, although,
as he judged, not more than one in a thousand
would be even in a state to consider them. His
thoughts swell, and surge, and overflow the ordinary-
formulas and phrases. Nay, his " sffiva indignatio "
sometimes made him unjust ; as, for example, in his
account, or rather caricature, of St. Ignatius Loyola.
'' Hard sayings for many a British reader," he
knew well would be his denunciations of modern
philanthropy, of parliamentary eloquence, of what
is called self-government, of the school of political
economists then dominant. And, in fact, to the
great majority they seemed sheer insanity. His
dispraise was in all the newspapers : nay, in well-
nigh all the reviews and magazines. " These
pamphlets, taking them altogether," a writer in
Blachioood judged, " are about the silliest produc-
tions of the day," a sentence for which he expressed
''regret," since "Mr. Carlyle may lay claim to
the possession of some natural genius and ability."
One thinks of the Hebrew patriarch prescient of
the doom of the Cities of the Plain : " Up, get you
out of this place ; for the Lord will destroy this
city. But he seemed as one that mocked."
Seventeen years afterwards — it was in 1867 —
Carlyle lifted up his testimony for the last time in his
Shooting Niagara and After? " Disraeli had given
the word," Mr. Froude observes, " and his party
IV.] SCHWABMEBEL 149
had submitted to be educated. Political emanci-
pation was to be the road for them — not practical
administration and war against lies and roguery.
Carlyle saw that we were in the rapids, and could
not any more get out of them ; but he wished to
reheve his own soul, and he put together this
pamphlet." His own account of it is, •' It came
out mostly by accident, little by volition, and is
very fierce, exaggerative, ragged, unkempt, and
defective. Nevertheless, I am secretly rather glad
than otherwise that it is out, that the howling
doggeries (dead ditto and other) should have my
last word on their affairs and them, since it was
to be had." That he expected as little immediate
result from this "last word" as from the words
which had gone before it, he told the world, plainly
enough, in a few pregnant sentences, which I will
read.
"It is indeed strange how prepossessions and
delusions seize upon whole communities of men ;
no basis in the notion they have formed, yet every-
body adopting it, everybody finding the whole
world agree with him, and accept it as an axiom
of Euclid ; and in the universal repetition and
reverberation taking all contradiction of it as an
insult, and a sign of malicious insanity, hardly to
be borne with patience. . . . All the world assent-
ing, and continually repeating and reverberating,
there soon comes that singular phenomenon which
the Germans call Scliivdrmerey (enthusiasm is our
poor Greek equivalent) which simply means
150 CABLYLE. [lect.
Swarmery, or ' the gathering of men in swarms,'
and what prodigies they are in the habit of doing
and believing when thrown into that miraculous
condition. . . . Singular in the case of human
swarms, with what perfection of unanimity and
quasi-reHgious conviction, the stupidest absurdities
can be received as axioms of Euclid, nay, as
articles of faith, which you are not only to believe,
unless malignantly insane, but are, if you have any
honour or morality, to push into practice and
without delay, see done, if your soul would live !
Divine commandment to vote (Manhood Suffrage —
Horsehood, Doghood ditto not yet treated of)
universal ' glorious Liberty ' (to sons of the Devil
in overpowering majority, as would appear) ; count
of Heads the God-appointed way in this Universe,
all other ways Devil- appointed ; in one brief word,
which includes whatever of palpable incredibility
and delirious absurdity, universally believed, can
be uttered or imagined on these points, *the
equality of men,' any man equal to any other ;
Quashee Nigger to Socrates or Shakespeare ; Judas
Iscariot to Jesus Christ; — and Bedlam and Gehenna
equal to the New Jerusalem, shall we say? If
these things are taken up, not only as axioms of
Euclid, but as articles of religion, burning to be
put in practice for the salvation of the world, I
think you will admit that Swarmery plays a con-
siderable part in the heads of poor mankind ; and
that very considerable results are likely to follow
from it, in our day."
I have read this passage because it presents,
with singular vividness, a dominant thought of
IV.] DEVOTION TO BEALITY. 151
Carlyle's in his accusations, denunciations, con-
demnations of the public and social order of our
day. Veneration of, conformity with, loyalty to
truth — this, as he might himself have said, was
the Alpha and Omega of his spiritual and intel-
lectual life. And this, I may note in passing,
supplied the standard by which he judged public
men. Hence his admiration of Welhngton, ''the
last honest and perfectly brave man they had;"
and of Sir Eobert Peel, of whom Wellington
testified : "I have never known him tell a de-
liberate falsehood : " a eulogy certainly implying
a curious estimate of our politicians generally.
Hence his profound contempt for a famous party
leader, still living, and not to be named by
me here, whom he described as " incapable
of seeing veritably any fact whatever," as
"most incomparable master in the art of per-
suading the multitude of the thing that is not."
I spoke just now of the striking parallel which
might be drawn between Carlyle and Mohammed.
The basis of it would be the absolute devotion
of each to reality, and to the Supreme Reality of
w^hom, and for whom, and by whom are all things.
You remember how the great Arabian Prophet
saw his city of Mecca wholly given to idolatry,
and how w^hen he victoriously returned thither,
he entered into the Kaaba, and smote down,
one after another, the foul and monstrous images
that defiled that sanctuary, exclaiming, " Truth
152 CABLYLE. [lect.
has come and falsehood vanisheth : verily, false-
hood is evanescent." So our Latter Day Prophet,
as he looked around him, discerned that the deities
whom the men of his generation worshipped and
served, were idols of the den and idols of the
market-place. On Sunday, indeed, they might
profess a belief in The True, The Just, drawing
nigh unto Him with their lips and honouring Him
with their tongue ; but their heart was far from
Him. Not truth, not justice — the dictates of His
eternal law — but mendacity and wrong were, con-
sciously or unconsciously, the motive principles of
their lives. The thing they practically believed
and laid to heart concerning the Universe and
their part therein — their real religion — was truly
Heathenism : " mere sensuous representation of
this mystery of Life, and for chief recognized
element therein, Physical Force." "Faith in an
Invisible, not as real only, but as the only
reality," " the recognition that Time, through
every meanest moment of it, rests on Eternity,"
— of that he found small trace. The political
order was reared on one fundamental lie — the
right of all men, whatever their capacity or
incapacity, to an equal share of political power :
the economic order, upon another fundamental lie,
expressed in the phrase, "the greatest happiness
of the greatest number." The worship of majori-
ties and the worship of Pigswash, Eousseauan
Egalitarianism and Benthamite Utilitarianism
IV.] THE BEIGN OF VOBTEX. 153
— these were the false religions which Carlyle
found dominating men's hearts and lives : religions
not exclusive of each other, for both were but
different expressions of the same crass Material-
ism. Carlyle judged that they had poisoned
the very fount of human thought, and made
human speech essentially false. They were a flat
negation of the Divine Law of the Universe :
"the law of Nature and of Nations," ruling
over every department of human life, public or
private, by its mandates or by its penalties.
"Thou Great Soul of the World, Thou art just,"
he exclaims in one place. But in the prevailing
creeds, political and economic, that belief had no
place. " A wretched, unsympathetic, scraggy
Atheism and Egoism " had taken its place.
" Yortex reigns, having kicked out Zeus," said
the Attic humourist : Atz/os ^aaikevei tov Al
i^eXr)\aK(o^. Carlyle found that the hyperiudi-
vidualism of the day had made this literally true.
Man and his unstable caprices and insatiable
cupidities had taken the place of God and His
immutable law, the expression of perfect reason.
Justice, according to the new doctrine, is what
the many wish — " ce que le peuple veut est juste."
The comfort of the many, it teaches, is the test
of right and wrong, and the end of life. " All in-
stitutions" — all^ note, without exception — "ought
to have for their aim the physical, intellectual,
and moral amelioration of the poorest and most
154 CABLYLE. [lect.
numerons class," Mr. John Moiiey declares; add-
ing, "this is the People," with a capital P.
Now, these were to Carlyle false ways, which
he utterly abhorred. He divided mankind into
two classes — the wise few, and the unwise
many who have men's susceptibilities, appetites,
and capabilities, but not the insights and higher
virtues of men. And not the unwise many, but
the wise few, he taught, were the rightful rulers,
the divinely appointed guides of mankind. This
is, in substance, his doctrine of great men. To
the cult of majorities he opposed the cult of
superiorities; to the rule of the multitude, the
necessity of loyalty and obedience. Carlyle con-
ceived of a hero as a man who has received a
divine mission and who triumphantly carries it
out, at all perils : whether in captivity, like
Moses ; in the cloister, like Abbot Samson ; on
the field of battle, like Cromwell. ''It is the
property of the hero," he tells us, "in every time,
in every place, in every situation, that he comes
back to reality : that he stands upon things, and
not upon shews of things." The intellectual
endowments of the man are of small importance.
It is a moral force which makes him a hero. It
is the virility — virtue — wherewith he accomplishes
his work, that makes us bow down before him in
wonder and reverence. I need hardly observe that
this doctrine of heroes is the negation of the reign
of fatalism, of necessity, of logical enchainment
IV.] EQUALITY OF VOTING. 155
in history. It is, of course, also the negation
of Rousseauan egalitarianism, and the " one man,
one vote" sophism. "Of the theory of equality
of voting," he judged, " the annals of human in-
fatuation do not contain the equal." ''This, at
bottom," he declared, '' is the wish and prayer of
all human hearts, everywhere and at all times ;
' Give me a leader ; a true leader, not a false,
sham leader — a true leader that he may guide me
on the true way, that I may be loyal to him, that
I may swear fealty to him and follow him, and
feel that it is well with me.' " This true leader,
or hero, Carlyle warned the world, would never be
obtained by the existing method of universal suf-
frage and ballot boxes. That method, he insisted,
must issue in " phantasm captains," at best medio-
crities, but usually scoundrels. Consider this
passage from his Latte?- Day PainjyJiIets : —
" Unanimity on board ship — yes, indeed, the
sliip's crew may be very unanimous, which doubt-
less, for the time being, will be very comfortable
for the ship's crew, and to their phantasm captain,
if they have one. But if the tack they unani-
mously steer upon is guiding them into the belly
of the abyss, it will not profit them much. Ships
accordingly do not use the ballot box, and they
reject the phantasm species of captain. One
wishes much some other entities, since all entities
lie under the same rigorous set of laws, could be
brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at least
of self-preservation — the first command of nature."
156 CABLYLE. [lect.
Again, to the purely empirical doctrine, based
on calculations of profit and loss, that happiness,
or as Mr. Herbert Spencer calls it, " agreeable
feehng," is the test of all rules of conduct and
the end of life, Carlyle opposed the fundamental,
aboriginal, indecomposable idea of right, as a divine
order, ruling through the universe. He felt that
right, as such, differs from happiness or agreeable
feeling, as such, in its very essence, just as hear-
ing differs from seeing, or feeling from intellect.
Not the comfortable, the delectable, the ex-
pedient, no — but the true, the just, the good are,
he taught, the ideals that most potently attract
men, and that alone satisfy the godlike which is in
them. Nay, more, the very hardships, dangers,
sacrifices attending the pursuit of those ideals
— things uncomfortable, undelectable, inexpedient,
to flesh and blood — have in themselves a charm
for us. " It is a calumny on men," Carlyle
declares — and the words may well be noted in
view of the undue disparagement of human nature
often alleged against him — " it is a calumny on
men to say that they are roused to heroic action
by ease, hope of pleasure, recompense, sugar-plums
of any kind in this world or the next. In the
meanest mortal there lies something nobler. . . .
Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, are the allure-
ments that act on the heart of man. Kindle the
inner genial life of him, you have a flame that
burns up all lower considerations." The whole
IV.] OBTEODOX POLITICAL ECONOMY. 157
doctrine of the so-called orthodox political econo-
mists appeared to Carlyle false : mere " pig-philo-
sophy," absolutely opposed to the true laws
whereby we live and move and have our being
as men. He was never tired of overwhelming it
with ridicule and contempt. He had read, as he
once expressed himself, " some barrowfuls " of the
works of its expositors. And the more he read
them, the less he liked it. He saw clearly enough
that starting, as it does, from premises arbitrarily
assumed, or imperfectly verified, isolating, as it
does, certain facts with which it deals fi"om others
inseparably bound up with them, it is not a real
science, but a pseudo-science, or, as Toynbee
called Eicardo's once famous book, " an intel-
lectual imposture." It is now dead, that old
orthodox political economy, and let us hope will
soon receive fitting burial : the burial of an ass.
Perhaps Carlyle did more than any other man to
kill it, and to bring home the truth insisted on
so fruitfully in Germany by the school of Hilde-
brand, Knies, Eoscher, Breutano, Held, Schmoller,
Nasse, Schaffle, Eosler, and Wagner, that political
economy must properly be considered among those
ethical sciences which have the free actions of
men as their subject-matter.
Further, Carlyle discerned and declared, that
at the root of Eousseauan Egalitarianism and
Benthamite Utilitarianism there lay a false con-
ception of human freedom ; an untrue doctrine
158 CABLYLE. [lect.
of man's autouomy ; issuing, in the one case,
in the tyranny of the mob : in the other, in the
tyranny of capitalists. Both to Rousseau and to
Bentham, as to Adam Smith before him, liberty
meant lawlessness. It was part of Carlyle's
message to the world that there was no liberty
save in obedience to the laws of the universe.
He proclaimed, in his own fashion, the truth
so admirably expressed by Kant, that the dis-
tinction of a rational being, whereby he is alto-
gether differentiated from irrational nature, is,
" the faculty of acting according to the conscious-
ness of laws " : that our free action properly
means action from a rational, not an animal
motive. The account of freedom given by a
teacher much honoured at the present day —
"the ability of each to carry on his own life
without hindrance from others, so long as he does
not hinder them " — by no means approved itself
to Carlyle. Such freedom he regarded as merely
negative, without root in itself; physical, not
rational : chaotic, not constructive : bestial, not
human. Everywhere, as I said just now, he found
the condition of human freedom in obedience to
law issuing from the nature of things ; divine in
the truest sense, as necessarily existing, as pro-
ceeding from the Necessary Being who, as Schiller
sings, discreetly veils Himself in eternal laws :
"Bescheiden verhiillt er sich in ewigen Gesetzen."
Only in the apprehension of this truth and in its
IV.] TBUE FBEEBOM. 159
practice — which is justice — he testified, can man
break his birth's invidious bar, deliver himself
from servitude to physical necessity, and work
out his liberty. ''Act well your part — therein
all honour lies," the great moral poet of the last
century sings. Yes ; and all freedom too, Carlyle
would have added. A man's true freedom, Carlyle
judged, resides in Kberty to find his appointed
work in the world, and to do it with all his might.
The emancipated and voting Demerara nigger,
his viscera full of pumpkin, his rum bottle in his
hand, and no breeches on his body, declining to
do a stroke of work beyond what was needed for
procuring rum and pumpkin, did not answer to
Carlyle's conception of a free man. As little did
the English labourer, also endowed with a vote,
free, under what Adam Smith calls, " the obvious
and simple system of natural liberty," "to pursue
his own interests his own way, and to bring his
industry and his capital into competition with
those of any men or order of men." "Lord of
himself, that heritage of woe," his capital consisted
of his ten fingers, skilled or unskilled ; his liberty,
in the choice offered him to toil for the minimum
competition wage on which he could live and
propagate, or to starve, steal, or go into the work-
house.
The true description of the political and
economical condition of this age appeared to
darlyle to be, not liberty, but anarchy. The
160 CABLYLE. [lect.
Democracy of our day — " false Democracy " a
thinker of a very different school, John Stuart
Mill, called it — Carlyle admonished the world,
is "a self-cancelling business," "has in it no
finality;" is merely ''a swift transition towards
something other and farther." " Not towards the
impossibility, self-government of a multitude by
a multitude, but towards some possibility of
government by the wisest, does bewildered Europe
struggle ; the blessedest possibility, not mis-
government, not Laissez-faire, but veritable
government. . . . The relation of the taught to
their teacher, of the loyal subject to his guiding
king, is, under one shape or another, the vital
element of human society ; indispensable to it,
perennial in it ; without which, as a body reft
of its soul, it falls down into death, and with
horrid, noisome dissolution, passes away and dis-
appears." It was in his book on Chartism,
published, you will remember, in 1839, that these
words were written. More than thirty years after-
wards France, " full of mad and loud oblivion of
the laws of the universe," appeared to Carlyle
emphatically to echo the monition they contain.
In 1871, he wrote of " the murderous doings by
the poorest classes in Paris," which make that
year terrible in the annals of our century, " they
are a tremendous proclamation to the upper classes
in all countries, ' Our condition, after eighty-two
years of struggling, ye quack upper classes, is
IV.] SOCIALISM. 161
still unimproved : more intolerable fi'om year to
year, from revolution to revolution ; and by the
Eternal Powers, if you cannot mend it, we will
blow up the world, along with ourselves and you. ' "
It is sometimes asserted that Carlyle's sym-
pathies were largely with the Socialistic move-
ment. I should like to say a few words about
that. Socialism — whatever else it may or may
not be — is unquestionably a protest against the
political and economical anarchy of our day, and
on behalf of a reorganization of the common-
wealth. With this protest Carlyle did deeply
sympathize. He held that the State is not a
fortuitous congeries of unrelated human units, but
an organism — a truth utterly hidden from the eyes
of Eousseau and Bentham : an organism consist-
ing of parts not uniform, but diverse ; representing
various degrees of individuality ; fulfilling distinct
functions ; and all co-operant to the end of the
commonweal. More, he held that it is an ethical
organism, the outcome of an order of necessary
truths, quite independent of human volition : its
very foundation the acknowledgment that there
are eternal, immutable principles of right and
wrong ; its office to unite its members by a moral
bond. He held that those rights of the indi-
vidual, to which it gives vahdity and coercive-
ness, are conditioned by duties, and exist in
subordination to the supreme claims of the com-
munity ; that they are not absolute but relative to
162 CABLYLE. [lect.
moral ends. He held that men cannot continue
to insist upon their rights if they neglect the
duties which are the complement of those rights ;
and that if they do insist, they will find their
insistence, in the long run, idle, because unjust.
And so, with regard to the right of private property
in particular, he held that it is conditioned by the
duty to work, that it is fiduciary and must be exer-
cised for the benefit of the community, for the
common good. To the question, "Is it not lawful
for me to do what I will with my own ? " he would
reply : *' It is not your own, in strictness : you did
not create it : ' the earth is the Lord's and no
the Duke's,' as the Scotch peasant said. You
are a steward, bound to use what has been
entrusted to you in the way prescribed by reason,
by the laws of the universe : bound to employ
your one talent, or your ten talents, for the
service of your day and generation — to work * as
ever in the Great Taskmaster's eye ; ' bound
under the penalties that are the sanctions of
those laws." " You ask [a man] at the year's end,
' Where is your three hundred thousand pounds ?
what have you realized to me with that ? ' He
answers, in indignant surprise, ' Done with it !
Who are you that ask ? I have eaten it ; I and
my flunkies and parasites, and slaves, two-footed
and four-footed, in an ornamental manner ; and
I am here alive by it — I am realized by it to
you.' It is such an answer as was never before
IV.] WOBK AND PBOPEBTY. 163
given under the sun — an answer that fills me
with boding apprehension, with foreshadows of
despair." Such was Carlyle's message to the
unemployed rich, in Past and Present, And so,
in his Chartism, he warns them : " A day is ever
struggling forward, a day will arrive, in some
approximate degree, when he who has no work
to do, by whatever name he may be called, will
not find it good to show himself in our corner
of the solar system ; but may go and look out
elsewhere if there be an idle Planet discoverable."
Carlyle taught then that work is a social
function and property a social trust. Again, he
discerned and proclaimed that the great economic
problem of the age is the proper division of
the fruits of labour; and that we can no longer
leave that division ''to be scrambled for by
the Law of the Strongest, Law of Supply-and-
Demand, Law of Laissez-faire, and other idle
laws and unlaws." "A fair day's wage for a fair
day's work, is as just a demand as governed men
ever made of governors. It is the everlasting
right of man." But the demand of the labourer,
his just demand, goes beyond that. Cash payment
is not the sole nexus of man and man. Civil
society is an ethical organism, and its reciprocal
rights and duties cannot be so satisfied. "It is
for justice that the poor labourer struggles ; for
just wages, not in money only. An ever-toiling
inferior, he would fain (though as yet he knows it
164 CABLYLE. [lect.
not) find for himself a superior, that should wisely
and lovingly govern. Is not that, too, the just
wages of his service done ? It is for a manlike
place and relation in this world, where he sees him-
self a man, that he struggles." That place, Carlyle
believed, would never be attained by him under
the existing regime of individualism and competi-
tion. He saw and testified, through evil report
and through good report — chiefly through evil —
that the question of Capital v. Labour is not
merely a stomach question : that it is an ethical,
yes, and a religious question : that the relation
of master and man is a moral bond, involving
grave duties and grave responsibihties on either
side ; duties and responsibilities of a human cha-
racter. " Love of men cannot be bought by cash
payment, and without love men cannot endure
to be together." The truth succinctly expressed
by Professor Ingram, " The mere conflict of
private interests will never produce a well-ordered
commonwealth of labour," was ever present to
Carlyle. The reorganization of industry upon
an ethical basis, he well knew and constantly
declared, was a task now lying before the world,
which must be carried through. This was his
message to the end. Thus in his Edinburgh
Address, after noting how a rough, rude, ignorant
man is formed into a trained soldier, he went
on to observe that " there were many things that
could be regimented, organized into this mute
IV.] UmVEBSAL MILITABY SERVICE. 165
system ... in some of the mechanical, com-
mercial, and manufactm-ing departments." And
in his Niagara he declared, for the last time, his
conviction that '' servantship and mastership, on
the nomadic principle, was ever, or will ever be,
except for brief periods, impossible among human
creatures." It is worth while noting how in this
ultimate work of his he has pointed to the
necessity of universal military service, and indi-
cated some of the priceless benefits which would
accrue from it. I will read a few of his words.
" I always fancy there might be much done in
the way of military drill withal. Beyond all
other schooling, and as supplement or even as
succedaneum for all other, one often wishes the
entire population could be thoroughly drilled, into
co-operative movement, into individual behaviom',
correct, precise, and at once habitual and orderly
as mathematics, in all or in very, very many points,
and ultimately in the point of actual military
service, should such be requu-ed. ... I would
begin with it, in mild, soft forms so soon almost
as my children were able to stand on their legs ;
and I would never wholly remit it till they had
done with the world and me. Poor Wilderspin
knew something of this ; the great Goethe
evidently knew a good deal ! This of outwardly
combined and plainly consociated Discipline, in
simultaneous movement and action, which may
be practical, symboKcal, artistic, mechanical in
all degrees and modes, — is one of the noblest
capabihties of man (most sadly undervalued
166 CABLYLE. [lect.
liitherto) ; and one he takes tlie gi'eatest pleasure
in exercising and unfolding, not to mention at
all the invaluable benefit it would afford him if
unfolded. ... A richer mine than any in
California for poor human creatures — richer by
what a multiple ; and hitherto as good as never
opened, worked only for the fighting purpose.
Assuredly I would not neglect the fighting purpose ;
no, from sixteen to sixty, not a son of mine but
should know the soldier's function too, and be
able to defend his native soil and self, in best
perfection when need came. But I should not
begin with this ; I should carefully end with this,
after careful travel in innumerable fruitful fields
by the way leading to this. . . . Nay, I often
consider farther, if, in any country, the Drill-
Sergeant himself fall into the partly imaginary or
humbug condition (as is my frightful apprehension
of him here in England, on survey of him in his
marvellous Crimean expeditions, marvellous court-
martial revelations, newspaper controversies, and
the like), what is to become of that country and
its thrice-miserable Drill- Sergeant ? Eeformed
Parliament, I hear has decided on a ' thorough
Army reform ' as one of the first things. So that
we shall at length have a perfect Army, field-
worthy and correct in all points, thinks Eeformed
ParHament ? Alas, yes ; and if the sky fall we
shall catch larks too."
I remember one of Carlyle's critics, some years
ago, in a magazine of name, expressing a doubt
" whether he had ever thrown out a single hint
IV.] '^INSIGHT AND OUTSIGHT:' 1<37
which could be useful to his own generation, or
profitable to them that come after." I confess
that the utterances of his on our public affairs,
which I have put before you, seem to me to mani-
fest what Browning called "insight and outsight "
in a degree possessed by no one else of our age ;
to be prophetic in the highest and truest sense
of the word — " profitable for doctrine, for reproof,
for correction, for instruction in righteousness."
They offer a singular contrast to "the raging
inanities of politics" — the phrase is Carlyle's —
which filled the newspapers and heads of most
men of his generation — probably of his critic,
among others.
I have said, perhaps, enough to indicate — for
that is our present point — what Carlyle had in
common with the Socialistic movement. Of
course he did not believe in the equal distribution
of physical comfort — the Utopia which most of its
leaders are looking for and, as they suppose, hasten-
ing unto — any more than he believed in the equal
distribution of political power, regarded by them
as a means to that end. But, more, between him
and the most widely popular school of Sociahsm
there was a great gulf fixed. Carlyle's political
and economical doctrines were grounded upon his
stern: and lofty Theism ; upon his transcendental
conception of duty. They were the direct out-
come of his intense, living, and life-giving belief
in a Supreme Moral Governor of the Universe in
168 CARLYLE. [lect.
whom the ethical order is eternally conceived,
eternally realized ; whose law, the expression of
perfect reason, is absolute justice, ruling every-
where by its mandates or its penalties ; that
"great immutable pre-existent law," Burke called
it, " prior to all our devices and prior to all our
sensations, by which we are knit and connected
in the eternal frame of the uDiverse, out of which
we cannot stir." But in Socialism, as taught by
its most widely popular and influential expositors,
there is no recognition of that Supreme Moral
Governor, of that divine, eternal, and necessary
Law of Eight, obligatory upon all wills, in all
spheres of action, in all worlds, from which all
human rights spring, of which all human laws, so
far forth as they are just, are appUcations and
adaptations. No doubt Socialism is a word cover-
ing many varieties of doctrine. The literature of
the subject is enormous, and is daily growing.
No doubt a Socialism is conceivable which might
be described in Prince von Bismarck's phrase as
" applied Christianity." Indeed, the Dean of Ely
has endeavoured to formulate such a doctrine in
his Democratic Creed, a document containing little,
I think, which Carlyle would not have accepted.
But this is not what Sociahsm commonly means.
This is not the Socialism recommended to the
world by Marx and Bebel, by Malon and Jaures,
by Hyndman and Gronlund. The doctrine of
these teachers is frankly materialistic. Their
IV.] THE RELIGION OF SOCIALISM. 169
gospel is as much a gospel of Pigswash as is
the doctrine of Bentham and the old political
economists. With one accord they hold wealth
the summum bonum, and what they call happiness
— that is, physical comfort, accompanied, perhaps,
by a certain modicum of intellectual cultivation —
the true and sole end of man. Their Socialism
is utterly unethical, for its only morality is a
morality of self-interest, which is no morahty at
all. God, Immortality, Eternity, have no place in
it. It has no religion, but offers itseK as a sub-
stitute for all religions. That has been very
clearly stated by Mr. Belfort Bax — one of the
ablest and most authoritative of Socialist leaders
— in his noteworthy volume. The Religion of
Socialism : —
" Socialism," he tells us, "utterly despises the
' other world ' with all its stage properties — that
is, the present objects of religion. It brings back
religion from heaven to earth. It looks beyond
the present moment or the present individual
life, indeed, though not to another world, but to
another and a higher social life in this world. It
is in the hope and the struggle for this higher
social life, ever widening, ever intensifying, whose
ultimate possibilities are beyond the power of
language to express, or thought to conceive, that
the Socialist finds his ideal, his religion."
And again : —
" The establishment of society on a Socialistic
170 CABLTLE. [lect.
basis, would imply the definite abandonment of
all theological cults, since the notion of a tran-
scendent god or semi-divine prophet is but the
counterpart and analogue of the transcendent
governing class. So soon as we are rid of the
desu-e of one section of the community to enslave
another, the dogmas of an effete creed will lose
their interest. As the religion of slave industry
was Paganism, as the religion of serfage was
Catholic Christianity or Sacerdotalism, as the
religion of capitalism is Protestant Christianity or
Biblical dogma, so the religion of collective and
co-operative industry is Humanism, which is only
another name for Socialism."
Assuredly Carlyle would have fully agreed with
Leo XIII. in reprobating such Socialism as "a
deadly plague " (lethiferam pestem), as a blas-
phemy, to use the words of Mohammed concerning
a somewhat similar doctrine, at which "the
heavens might tear open and the earth cleave
asunder." He would have regarded it as the
direct offspring of the philosophy of the trough
taught by Bentham and the old orthodox political
economists ; a mere chapter^ and a most ignoble
one, in the gospel of Pigswash.
Before I leave this subject I should like to
point out that Carlyle's political and social
doctrines, however strange they may have sounded
in the ears of his generation, were by no means
new. Like his Theism and his ethics, they may
be found, in substance, in St. Thomas Aquinas.
IV.] TO SOPHISTS AND SCIOLISTS. 171
It is not, of course, that our Latter Day Prophet
derived his teachings from the Angelic Doctor,
of whom we may be quite sure he had never
read a line. It is that, whether in the thirteenth
century or in the nineteenth, the human reason,
correctly exercised, tends to the same conclusions
in moral philosophy — of which poHtics and eco-
nomics are branches — determining what ethical
obHgation is, fixing the comprehension of the
idea "I ought," unfolding the extension of that
idea, and exhibiting what things fall under its
categorical imperative. There are no new truths
— suffer me again to insist on this — in pohtics or
economics (I mean of course fundamental truths),
although, in different stages of civilization, the
application of old truths varies. The warning of
Burke to the sophists and sciolists of his gene-
ration is equally applicable to the sophists and
scioHsts of ours. " We know that we have made
no discoveries, and we think that no discoveries
are to be made, in morality ; nor many in the
great principles of government, nor in the ideas
of liberty which were understood long before we
were born, altogether as well as they will be after
the grave has heaped its mould upon our pre-
sumption, and the silent tomb shall have imposed
its law on our pert loquacity."
So much must suffice regarding this great
172 CABLYLE. [lect.
teacher, in whom I reverently recognize the last
of our prophets, and by no means the least. It
will be said that his teaching was incomplete,
his mission imperfect. I am not concerned to
deny that. Thus, in his poUtical and social
doctrine, I think he inadequately appreciated the
sacred rights and inalienable prerogatives of
human personality. His standpoint, in viewing
public affairs, was very much that of a Hebrew
seer — of Elijah, say, or Elisha. Well, the
thoughts of men have widened since the days
of those great Jewish patriots and sages. No
doubt they apprehended the sacredness of the
moral Ego more truly than any other of the
illustrious teachers of the antique world, and, in
their way, they witnessed for it, and vindicated
it. But the ages which divide us from them,
have beheld the gradual evolution of the personal,
social, and public prerogatives which make up
individual freedom. It is in this that the real
political progress of the world consists. I think
Carlyle inadequately realized, and insufficiently
valued that progress. Again, I honour him for
having so effectively insisted on the great truth —
so I account it — of retributive justice ; for having
vindicated, so emphatically, the verity that punish-
ment is, first and before all things, vindictive ;
that it is what is due to the evildoer, what he
has justly earned ; that it is, in Hegel's phrase,
the other half of crime : the natural and therefore
ir.] PBECIOUS ELEMENTS LACKING. 173
the divinely appointed sequel of the wrongful
deed. But Carlyle does not always rememher —
he appears, for example, to have forgotten it in
certain well-known passages of his Latter Day
Pamplilets — that behind the malefactor we should
still see the man ; that the criminal, in his deepest
degradation and dishonour, does not cease to be
a person, with claims upon, with rights against
society, springing from the essential nature of
humanity.
And so in his religious behef — from which, as
I have pointed out, all his teaching flowed — many
precious elements, as it seems to me, are lacking :
elements that the world cannot do without. A
very judicious critic has said that in Carlyle 's
religion there was no New Testament. Certainly
there was not much of the Neiu Testament in it.
To be candid — and I owe candour both to you
and to myself — I think Carlyle rejected many
things in his hereditary creed which are tenable
after criticism has done its worst. But " we speak
that we do know, and we testify that we have
seen." The man's intense veracity would not
suffer him to go one hair's-breadth beyond what
he knew and had seen. And this absolute loyalty
to truth was one great secret of his power. We
must remember, however, that although personally
unable to associate himself with any Christian
Church or sect, his attitude to Christianity,
throughout his life, was one of devout and grateful
174 CABLYLE. [lect.
reverence. For Christian dogmas he cared httle.
At Cambridge there is, or was, a street called
St. Tibb's Lane. And I remember, that when
a freshman of that University — being, as I suppose,
of an inquiring turn of mind — I asked a very
accomplished Scottish friend, supposed to know
everything, who St. Tibbs was. He replied, " I
am sorry I cannot tell you. I was not brought
up in the worship of Tibbs." Well, Carlyle was
not brought up to attach much importance to the
canons of Ecumenical Councils, or the rulings
of Popes, whence, as a matter of fact, the defini-
tions of Christian dogmas current in the world are,
chiefly, derived. Eeligious doctrines appeared to
him, for the most part, mere commandments of
men. He distinguished between them and what
he called the soul of the Christian religion. Thus,
in his Edinburgh Address, which may be taken to
present his fully matured view on the matter,
he said, " To learn to recognize in pain, sorrow,
contradiction — even in these things, odious as
they are to flesh and blood — to learn that there
lies in them a priceless blessing, that Goethe
defines as being the soul of the Christian religion :
the highest of all religions : a height, as he says —
and that is very true even to the letter, as I
consider — to which the human species was fated
and enabled to attain; and from which, having
attained it, it can never retrograde." For the
Person and teaching of the Author of Christianity
IV.] VALEDICTION, 175
he had always the greatest veneration. "The
highest Voice ever heard on earth," he says in
his Lectures on Heroes : an utterance which indeed
I do not desire to press too far. "We must, of
course, take it in connection with his view of
great individuaHties ; a view practically identical
with the Hegelian, that they are visible incarna-
tions of the Eternal Idea. In this connection it
is interesting to note how, as years went on, his
sympathies with existing religions grew larger;
how even that fierce dishke of the Church of
Eome, which heredity and early environment had,
so to speak, made part and parcel of him, greatly
abated; how, at last — so Mr. Froude tells us —
he came to regard the Mass as " the most genuine
relic of religious behef now left to us."
But my time is up. It only remains for me,
in briefest words, to thank you for the honour
you have done me by coming, in such large
numbers, through this Siberian weather, to hear
me on these four Thursday afternoons. To me
it has been pleasant, indeed, to turn aside from
the historical and metaphysical questions which
have greatly occupied me of late years, and thus
to renew my acquaintance with the four teachers
and companions of my youth who have been my
themes. I cannot, indeed, say that the pleasure
has been unmixed. As, in preparation for these
176 CABLYLE. [lect. iv.
Lectures, I have turned over the familiar pages,
the far-off time when I first read them, in all the
charm of their freshness, came back to me ; and
with it memories of loved friends and of lovely
scenes closely associated with them ; and all
*' the tender grace of a day that is dead." But
if the swift years that hurry us through life take
much from us, they leave us much, they bring
us much. Theh last gift to me, and assuredly
not the least prized, is the indulgent audience
on whose kindly faces I now look for the last
time ; and to whom I say regretfully, Farewell.
INDEX.
A
Acton, Lord,
PAGE
on the theme and motive of George Eliot's art
. 102
on the influence of her works
. 113
Adam Bede ......
. 103
Jilschylus,
the deep underlying thought of his tragedies
. 101
Ancient Mariner, The .....
5
Aristophanes,
his humour ......
7
Aristotle,
his view of man .....
. 43
on the highest form of art
79
on poetic metres .....
81
on the function of the poet .
89
Art,
true distinction between it and physical scienc*
3 . 45
Kant on ..... .
. 47
opens a path into the transcendental
78
Schopenhauer on the function of .
78
is essentially religious ....
79
the highest form of ... .
79
rests on thought ......
92
" Art for Art " doctrine, the . . . .
40
Atheism, practical ......
. 139
Augustine, St.,
a profound dictum of .
. 133
N
178
INDEX.
B
PAGE
Balaam,
Carlyle on .
. 140
Ballot boxes,
Carlyle on .
. 155
Balzac,
on the relation of the novel to ethics
. 50
comparison between him and Thackeray .
51,59
George Sand on .
. 59
Barry Lyndon ....-•
55
Bax, Mr. Belfort,
his account of Socialism
. 169
Benthamism,
Carlyle on .
. 139
Boccaccio,
the great medieval humourist
8
Booh of Snobs, The .....
56-57
Burke,
on law eternal . . . . •
. 168
his warning to sophists and sciolists
. 171
Burlesque,
specimen of Dickens's excellence in
21-23
c
Calvinism,
its bankrupt bibliolatry and superannuated super-
stitions .......
. 126
primal facts of religion and life underlying
. 133
Candide,
a perfect specimen of cynicism
64
Capital V. Labour,
the question of ..... .
. 164
Caricature,
specimen of Dickens's excellence in
23-26
Carlyle,
on humour .......
5
on Dickens ......
28, 33
INDEX.
179
PAGE
Carlyle — continued.
on Thackeray's style ...... 59
and John Sterling . . . . . .118
widespread affection and reverence for, during the last
twenty or thirty years of his life . . .118
outcry against, shortly after his death . . .118
pleas in extenuation of his faults . . . 119-122
his humour ......
123-124
his literary style .....
. 124
was truly a prophet .....
125,126
his spiritual history . . .
126-132
his Theism . . 133-135, 143, 151, 153, 162,
167-168,
170, 174
his ethics .... 135-136, 139, 151,
153, 156,
161
-164, 167
his teaching not new .....
137,170
his definition of religion ....
. 138
on the Utilitarian philosophy
. 139
on Balaam .......
140-142
on the condition of England ....
142-170
and Socialism ......
167-170
incompleteness of his message
172-175
Carlyle, Mrs.,
on Vanity Fair . . . . .
58
Chartism, Carlyle's . . . . .144,
160, 163
Christianity,
George Eliot's attitude towards
90-97
current, is largely Materialism thinly >lisguised
. 131
sincere profession of, compatible with practi
cal
Atheism .......
139, 152
Carlyle's attitude towards ....
173-175
Cicero,
on definitions . . ...
3
on the furor poeticus .....
. 97
Coleridge,
the high-water mark of his genius
5
Corn Law Rhymes ......
. 142
Cromwell, Carlyle's ......
. 123
180
INDEX.
Cynicism,
real ....
a popular manifestation of
PAGE
64
120
D
Dalgairns, Father,
on the Devil's Church .
Daniel Deronda .
Darkness, the Great,
ever present to Carlyle
David Copperjield
Demerara Nigger, the,
emancipated and voting
Democracy,
a world- vride fact
Carlyle's view of
Dickens,
is the Humourist as Democrat
his strong magnetic personality
his artistic defects
his laudable ambition
his Pickivick
his David Copperfield
his Our Mutual Friend
his manner .
his Pictures from Italy
his strength
his dramatic genius
his mannerisms .
his passionate sensibility
his power in burlesque
in caricature,
in the pathetic
his work to democratize the novel
reveals the masses to the classes
Carlyle's judgment of .
reveals the masses to themselves
62
109
143
14
159
27
160
11
13
13-17
14
14
14
15
16
17
17
18
19
19
20-23
23-26
26,27
27
28
28, 33
28-29
INDEX.
181
PAGE
Dickens — continued.
fought strenuously for the elevation of the masses 30-31
his scorn of party politics .... 30-31
was ever simple and unpretentious .... 31
his place in English literature .... 32
compared with Victor Hugo ..... 33
George Eliot on . . . . . . .87
Drill 165
Dryness, moral
one great danger of the age ..... 29
function of poetry to preserve from ... 80
Dyspepsia,
incident to the prophetic calling .... 122
E
Edinburgh Address, Carlyle's ....
164,
174
Ego, the unity of,
the true starting-point in psychology
•
43
Eliot, George. See George Eliot
Ely, the Dean of,
his Democratic Creed .....
,
168
Emerson,
on shadows and realities ....
•
77
on Carlyle's manliness .....
•
122
Equality of voting,
Carlyle on
150,
155
Esmond, ........
•
58
Euripides,
spiritual affinity between him and George Eliot
100,
113
F
Fair day's wage, a,
Carlyle on .
Fichte,
on the moral order of the world
Fitzgerald, Edward,
on Thackeray's early literary career
163
136
55
182
INDEX.
Flaubert,
on the nullification of a work of art
FredericJc, Carlyle's ....
Freedom,
false conception of, combated by Carlyle
French Bevolution, Carlyle's .
Froude, Mr.,
his publication of Carlyle's papers .
on Carlyle's charity
on Carlyle's teaching
on Carlyle's Chartism
on Carlyle's Shooting Niagara and After
on Carlyle's view of the Mass
PAGE
49
. 124
157-169
. 123
118
122
133
146
148
175
G
Gay,
his humour ....... 6
Genius
necessary to constitute a man a humourist, in the full
sense of the word ...... 5
difference between it and talent .... 5
an incommunicable attribute ..... 6
George Eliot
a humourist, in the full sense of the word . . 84
the type of The Humourist as Poet ... 84
makes fullest proof of her poetic gift in her novels . 85
endowed with all the "six powers for the production
of poetry " enumerated by Wordsworth . 86-88
Eubens her favourite painter . . . .89
her genius recalls the great masters of the Spanish
school of painting ...... 89
expresses the universal element in human life . . 89
excelled in different orders of poetry ... 89
her poetic gift marred in her later years by a sort of
scientific pedantry ...... 90
not " an influential Positivist writer " nor " a a;od-
less writer" 90-99
INDEX.
183
PAGE
George Eliot — continued.
her ethos essentially that of the old Greek tragedians
99-102
retribution the constant theme and
art ••••••
ennobling influence of her work
Edmond Scherer on . . .
Goethe,
on the two kinds of imagination
on the ethical sentiment
on renunciation ....
Carlyle's obligations to
Hellenic largeness of life in .
recognizes in Carlyle a new moral force
on the Christian religion
Great men,
Carlyle's doctrine of . . . . . .154
motive of her
102-112
. 113
113-114
5
83
. 128
131-132
. 131
. 132
. 174
H
Hartmann, Eduard von.
on the deepening of the heart by Christianity
. 96
on artistic inspiration ....
97
Hegel,
on punishment .....
. 102
on great individualities
. 175
Herder,
dying exclamation of ,
. 117
Hero, the,
Carlyle's conception of .
. 154
Horace,
account of, by Persius ....
6
the typical Roman humourist
8
House of Commons, the.
Dickens on .
30, 31
Carlyle on .
. 145
Hugo, Victor,
and Dickens
33
184
INDEX.
PAGE
Hiimonr,
Carl^'le's view of .
5
the ordinary vehicle of .
9
Humourist, the,
Thackeray's account of .
3
his 'subject ......
4
his method ......
4
genius necessary to ... •
5
his differentia .....
6
definition of .....
6
former types of .
. 7-9
nineteenth-century types of, in England .
11, 12
Hunt, Leigh,
on Dickens ......
19
Ignatius Loyola, St.,
Carlyle's caricature of . . . .
Imagination,
two kinds of .... .
function of the novel in respect of the
importance of cultivating the
Individualities, great,
the Hegelian view of .
Ingram, Professor,
on a well-ordered commonwealth of labour
148
5,6
10
28
175
164
Jeffrey, Lord,
on " Little Nell " .
Johnson, Dr.,
his definition of a novel
of melancholy
Justice,
a popular view of
Carlyle's view of .
19
9
. 121
. 152
159, 163-164
INDEX, 185
K
PAGE
the highest
47
66
66
68
71
102
130
134
135
158
Kant,
on art .....
vast influence of his philosophy
his view of human personality
of man's autonomy
on vp-hat is implied in the realization of
ethical good ....
on the idea of punishment
Carlyle's adaptation of his doctrine of space and
time .....
on life without law
his conception of the moral law
on the distinction of a rational being
Koheleth,
a humourist of no mean order .... 7
L
Labourer, the English,
endowed with a vote . . . . . .159
Landor,
on Boccaccio ....... 8
his favourite character in Dickens's novels . . 19
Latter Day Pamphlets . . . . . 147, 155, 173
Liberty. See Freedom.
Lockhart,
on Carlyle's Past and Present . . . .147
Love,
sexual, differently apprehended by psychologists and
physiologists ....... 49
is essential to the maintenance of human relations
between employer and employed . . .164
M
Mackintosh, Sir James,
on manner ........ 16
Man,
is an ethical animal ..... 43, 61
his distinction as a rational being . . . .158
186
INDEX.
I'AGE
Mass, the,
a dictum of Carlyle concerning . . . .175
Masses, the,
Dickens's work for ..... 27-31
Materialism,
thinly disguised . . . . . . .131
and Socialism . . . . . . .168
Matter,
and spirit ........ 130
Maupassant, M. de,
on the " art for art" doctrine .... 40
Maya,
the veil of . . . . . . . .77
Melancholy,
ever attends genius ...... 121
Johnson's definition of . . . . . . 121
Merivale, Mr. Herman,
on Thackeray's style . . . . . ,52
Might and Eight,
Carlyle on . . . . . . . . 136
Military service,
Carlyle on 165-166
Mohammed,
spiritual affinities between him and Carlyle . 132, 151
Moral law, the,
Kant's argument from, as to a life heyond the
phenomenal . . . . . . .71
George Eliot on 101-102
Buddhist conception of . . . . . 1 02
Kant's conception of ..... . 135
Carlyle's concejition of . . . . . .135
Morley, Mr. John,
on George Eliot's verse ...... 84
on the j)roper aim of all institutions . . . 153
his account of the People . . . . .154
INDEX, 187
PAGE
N
Nature, external,
is a path into the transcendental . . . .77
Neio Testament, the,
not much of in Carlyle's religion . . . .173
Newman, Cardinal,
self-accusatory verses of . . . . .119
Novel, the,
Johnson's definition of . . . . . .9
is the ordinary vehicle of humour, in this age . . 9
varieties of .... . . . . 9
function of . . . . . . . .10
charm of . . . . . . . .10
Taine's comparison of English and French taste in . 38
the relation between it and ethics . . . 41-51
elements of excellence in . . . . .44
true vocation of writers of . . . . .45
importance of its ethos ...... 4(3
test for judging its ethical qualities . . 47-50
Our Mutual Friend . . . . . . .15
Panenthelsm . . . . , , . .130
Pantheism
Carlyle accused of . . . . . .129
what it properly means . . . . .129
Parliament, the British,
Dickens's opinion of . . . . . 30, 31
Party politics,
Dickens's opinion of . . . . . .30
Carlyle on 145, 167
Past and Present ...... 147, 1G2
Pathetic, the,
specimen of Dickens's excellence in ... 26
188
INDEX.
I'AGE
Paul, St.,
his Panentlieisin ....
. 130
Peel, Sir Eobert,
Carlyle's admiration for
. 151
the Duke of Wellington's tribute to
. 151
People, the,
Mr. John Morley's account of
. 153
Persius,
his account of Horace .
6
" Phantasm captains " .
. 155
Philosophy,
Thackeray's ....
. 61, 65-72
George Eliot's . . . •
91
Littre's account of the Positivist .
91
Carlyle's .....
l.-.G, 168, 170
PichioicJc ......
. 14
Pictures from Itali/ ....
17
Pig philosophy .....
. 157
Pigswash,
the gospel of ... .
. 169
Plato,
wide sense attached by him to the word philosophy . 61
an apologue of .
76
on poets .....
97, 132
his Panentheism ....
. 130
Poet, the.
his primary duty ....
45
Wordsworth's account of the powers necessary to . 86
Aristotle's account of his functions
. 89
Poetry,
importance of the functions of
79, 80
the essence of, not metrical form .
81
music an essential element of
81
the finest, may exist without metre
81
the common antithesis between and
prose, mis-
leading .....
. 82
Political Economy, orthodox,
Carlyle's view of .
157
INDEX.
189
Positivi^ra
PAGE
and George Eliot ....
91, 92
Print,
magnifying effect of .
. 120
Property, private,
Carlyle's view of . . . . . .162
Prophet, the,
characteristics of . . . . . 122, 125, 126
Psychology,
two views of .... .
41-44
Punch,
Thackeray's connection with .
Puritanism,
56
its effect on the popular mind
. 123
K
Kadicalism,
Dickens's ......
. 30
Parliamentary .....
Realism,
. 145
Dickens's ......
32
Eeligion,
Carlyle's definition of .
the real, of England ....
. 138
138, 152
Eenan,
on the author of Ecclesiastes
7
Ketribution,
the theme and motive of George Eliot's art
102-112
Retributive justice,
the great truth of, vindicated by Carlyle
Right,
new test of ......
. 172
. 153
Carlyle's doctrine of .
Ritchie, Mrs.,
. 156
on Dickens's creative power ....
18
on Thackeray's divinatory power .
Ruskin,
51
on reverence .....
63
190 INDEX.
I'AGK
s
Sand, George,
on Balzac's audacity ...... 59
on Balzac's minuteness ..... 59
Sartor Besartus 126-129
ychelling,
on artistic inspiration ...... 98
Scherer, Edmond,
on George Eliot .....•• 113
Schopenhauer,
on the function of art ...... 78
Science, physical,
is not concerned with ethics ~ . . . 41, 45
Scotland,
decay of dogmatic religious belief in . . .79
effect of Puritanism in . . . . . . 121
Second sight, moral . . • • • • .51
Shakespeare
supreme as a humourist ..... 8
Shelley,
on the common antithesis between poetry and prose . 82
Shooting Niagara and After .... 148-150, 165
Sidney, Sir Philip,
on poetry and verse . . • • • .82
Smith, Adam,
his conception of liberty . . . • 158, 159
Smith, Sidney,
on Dickens ....... 13
on the calling of great men ..... 65
Snobbery,
Thackeray's indictment of . . . . .56
Snobs, the Book of. See Booh of Snobs.
Socialism,
how far Carlyle sympathized with . . . 161-165
great gulf between Carlyle and its most popular
school 167-170
Society,
organic nature of . . . . . • .57
INDEX.
191
Socrates,
PAGE
accusation and execution of .
8
his humour ......
84
State, the,
is an ethical organism . . . .
. 161
Swarmery .......
Swift,
. 149
his humour .....
. • . 6
and Thackeray . . . . .
39, 63
T
Taine,
on Dickens .
his indictment of Thackeray
that indictment examined
his slavery to formulas .
his psychology
on Balzac
on Carlyle .
Talent,
difference between it and genius
Tennyson, Lord,
his Theism ....
Thackeray,
his account of the humourous writer
Taine's indictment of .
that indictment examined
comparison between him and Balzac
his intellectual training
his moral discipline
his literary apprenticeship
his Book of Snohs .
his Vanity Fair
his Esmond .
his veracity
his descriptive power
his philosophy of life
is not a misanthropist
. 19, 28, 37
37-40
41-51, 56-57, 63-65
41
42
50, 124
126
5
133
•■>
o
37-40
41-61, 56-57, 63-65
51, 59
52
53-54
55
55-57
58
58
59
59-60
51-52
62-63
11)2 INDEX.
PAGE
Tliackeray — continued.
his good people ....... 63
is not a cynic ...... 64-65
his moral philosophy essentially Kantian . 65-72
his psychology inferior to George Eliot's . . 87
Theism,
in George Eliot 93, 98-99
Lord Tennyson's . . . . . . .133
Carlyle's . . 183-135, 143, 151, 153, 162, 167-168,
170, 174
Tibhs, St 174
Tyndall, Professor,
on the function of the poet ..... 80
IT
Universal military service ...... 165
Universal suffrage . . . . . . 149, 155
Vanity Fair ........ 58
Vates, the,
Carlyle on . . . . . . . .125
Voltaire,
his cynicism ....... 64
Vortex,
the reign of ....... 153
W
Wellington, the Duke of,
Carlyle's admiration for . . . .151
his tribute to Sir Eobert Peel . . . .151
Wordsworth,
on the comparative popularity of prose and verse . 82
on " the six jDowers requisite for the production of
poetry" ........ 86
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